RIP. It’s been coming for a while, and Control Panel will likely be on hospice for a few more years, but it will be a sad day when control panel is gone.
Gone in favor of a less useful interface. Fantastic!
It is Windows…
Control Panel will likely be on hospice for a few more years
And I’ll keep visiting Control Panel in hospice. Bite me Microsoft.
That is good news - I assume they are done with the replacement as they announce this, otherwise they are just stupid. The problem is - why did it take this long time for a trillion dollar company to archive it?
If they are they haven’t pushed it to general release yet. Unless someone can point out where in the settings app I can adjust my audio device speaker configuration.
The en-metro-ification continues.
I mean, sticking with a paradigm that existed at least since windows 3.11 (my first version of windows) isn’t exactly ideal, entire software stacks are built around it existing.
It’s really too bad that Microsoft abandoned Windows Phone, because that is where this UI makes sense. But shoehorning the mistake of windows 8 into everything seems like doubling down on failure.
It would be nice if a competitor entered the space where usability is the goal and be an open source solution.
I have two perfect logo ideas. One with a cute little penguin, the other with smirking gnu. Just pitballing here
It would be nice if a competitor entered the space where usability is the goal and be an open source solution.
ReactOS?
If usability is the goal, then ReactOS is not the answer.
The hero we didn’t know we needed.
But have you heard of TempleOS my son?
Just kill all of windows already
My god, the amount of legacy crap in Windows.
They ought to just start over at some point.
We need Windows NNT - New New Technology
How about Windows NEW ALL (in reference to Tantacrul)?
Is that a real concern?
While I haven’t diven into their codebase, that kind of thing tends to severely limit what developers can do to improve the product, slow them down, etc.
Be it new features, deeper UX improvements, performance optimizations… Basically anything you want to do with your progress, generally speaking, it’s going to get harder the more legacy stuff you need to deal with.
Isn’t that what wine is ?
I don’t understand
On the flip side, this is what makes Windows generally very good at backwards compatibility. They do update the codebase for stuff, but still generally very backwards compatible with software and games designed to run on previous versions of Windows.
Fun Fact: Backwards compatibility is the reason you can’t name a file or folder CON.
So in six months, someone will have written a third-party Windows Control Panel.
Nah it’ll just be shoved into PowerToys.
honestly I still cant figure out how to configure a network interface properly without using the old control panel.
You literally can’t.
There’s a ton of stuff you can’t do with the new garbage settings.
Let’s not even mention that on an operating system called “Windows” you can only have one “window” of settings open. And opening new settings will just replace where you just where. Which is extremely rage inducing.
opening new settings will just replace where you just where
I don’t use windows super often anymore, so I don’t really have that usecase, but man. Just imagining it makes me annoyed and angry
You probably should never use a Mac then.
yup. The couple of times I had to use one, the bad UX absolutely annoyed the hell out of me
I honestly don’t understand why macs are so popular in IT. Flexibility and configurability are not the words that can be used to describe their system.
Then you don’t know what you’re talking about.
no u
Understood, thank you for your thorough contribution.
Yeah the new interface has restrictions it doesn’t tell you about until you try to apply new settings.
It’s not you. There are many things you simply cannot do in the settings app.
And if you can do it, it’s complicated and convoluted. I miss Win32 settings panels, everything was so well organized and simple to manage.
Are you on windows 10 or 11?
Mostly 11 now. I honestly prefer it to 10 now, but that’s with quite about of decrapification done to remove all of Microsoft’s bullshit.
At home I’m mostly using Ubuntu, but it’s basically covering firefox as all of my self-hosted stuff runs in thevbrowser and I don’t game much.
Hmm, then I’m a bit confused, since my experience with Windows 11 settings app has been good enough to not need to go into the control panel for setting up basic networking, unlike with Windows 10’s setting app.
As admin and tech support, I use the control panel constantly. I use the settings app… for display configuration, I guess?
Windows 8 came out in 2012. I switched to Linux shortly after.
If you’ve been suffering through this as a home user you have nobody but yourself to blame.
You’re not so busy you can’t learn a new OS in 12 years!
Plebs.
This is never going to happen fully, because there is a ton of software and also device drivers that hook into the OG Control Panel system and install their own .cpl’s there, which are required for that hardware/software to work. The system to support those is going to have to remain in place, otherwise Microsoft is going to have a lot of very angry corporate customers and hardware vendors up their noses in short order.
In fact, this is most likely the exact reason the Control Panel still exists behind the scenes the way it does today in Win10 and Win11. They’ll probably go to ever-greater lengths to hide it from home users, but I’d doubt they can actually remove it completely at this point.
In fact, from TFA:
Tip: while the Control Panel still exists for compatibility reasons and to provide access to some settings that have not yet migrated, you’re encouraged to use the Settings app, whenever possible.
I’m sure they could keep the backend and just update the look and UI frontend though, no?
Maybe, but they can’t change the look of all those third party .cpl applets.
And sure, anyone could theoretically do anything. But this is Microsoft we’re talking about. They’ll just put another layer of cruft on top of the five or six layers of cruft they’ve already got and then call it job done.
The whole point of the Settings “app” is to remove the user’s ability to do anything on their own computer. The old (and far more functional) UI of the Control Panel won’t get updated because Microsoft wants users to get scared when the unpretty UI appears.
That‘s like my bank saying „Hey, use our new website, the old one will be phased out in 6 werks“.
Me: „Ok, show me my bank statements“.
Bank: „That‘s only possible on the old site“.
Not a joke, sadly.
I’ve had a similar experience with my bank. There is no legacy site to fall back to anymore, sadly. I am still figuring out how to do things on the new site. Years after it was launched.
In favor of what? I still have to use control panel because some things are seemingly unreachable by the “settings” menus.
I wonder if you’re talking about the windows 10 or windows 11 version of the settings app?
Yes. I have win 10 and 11 devices. They both lack certain options and I’ve had to go around them, like using control panel. In this case only the win 11 device is at risk of getting much worse.
Great. So managing printers, network settings and quickly comparing settings from two places becomes a weird game of screenshots and guessing.
Remote support workers of the world collectively shake their fist in despair.
No way on this planet I will be able to explain the new UI to your average office worker.
It’s as if they intentionally were making their products unusable for ADHD and especially AuDHD people.
I wonder sometimes, maybe they are. Maybe there’s some policy coming from some macchiavellian cokehead in a suit, that people like us spoil their big, important social mechanisms and introduce a measure of chaos they don’t want, so we have to be suppressed.
I just don’t understand why Windows is such an ADHD torture today. Even XP wasn’t.
It really seems sometimes as if they were going out of their way to make it such, not only MS, but also Google, Apple and who not.
Its not good. Control panel is consistent and precise. Settings is not consistent lacks many settings and many are dumbed down
I know, I still have to touch Windows at work.
The first thing I did after getting my work laptop was to install Linux. I am so glad that my work allows it.
I know, I still have to touch Windows at work.
Windows: Only when paid to touch it.
Definitely an issue. I can’t count the times I’ve slammed my head because the stupid settings screen “conveniently” switches from the previous item to another while I still expected it to open a new window just like the command panel.
I work on an application that went through multiple iterations of UIs. Each superseded the previous one and a new admin UI was built into them. The oldest one was using Flash.
Occasionally I still have to drill down through four layers of “open legacy UI here” to get to some obscure, long forgotten setting. Manipulating shit with half-working elements in a VM running a flash-capable browser. Day to day I just go back one iteration though, because the admin UI has everything I need there. Unlike the latest iteration.
Some day we play on killing off the flash UI version completely. We already have planned workarounds in place to manipulate those obscure settings through endpoint calls. Won’t be missed. But I’d miss the second to last admin UI that has everything where I need greatly.
This is what ms is killing off now. A good UI in windows where you can find everything. And all it’d have taken to make it better is give it a robust search functionality. No one cares about going back and forth in convoluted loops between sleek UI pages. People that care to manage stuff in windows at depth will be forced into shallow shit.
The oldest one was using Flash.
I’m so sorry my dude, no one deserves that kind of suffering.
That’s okay because Windows will be gone entirely from my PC in a month.
so who’s gonna build us a control panel widget. I can only code C
I’d be surprised if the windows control panel wasn’t written in C.
I’d be surprised if it is in C, it’s probably in C++. That’s been the language of Windows since pretty much forever.
It looks like it was written in plain html.
Any bet the control panel is the only thing holding my dad back from switching to Linux for home use, because he absolutely hates the windows 10 and 11 settings apps.
