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On brand. Settings is like control panel but dumber.
If Microsoft had actually moved all the settings over to the “new” settings app (it’s 12 years old, btw), I’d be supportive of this.
It’s a joke that windows has 2 settings apps, and searching for specific settings in the start menu will take you to either, or to both.
But as we all know, Microsoft won’t do this properly. They’ll likely just continue with their 75% finished settings app while hiding the control panel, and if you need something not in the settings app you’ll have to open some old menu using a run command or some other terrible convoluted step that makes you feel like you’re running a half-baked Linux distro from 2003.
MacOS, Android, iOS, Linux distros don’t have this issue. Fucking TempleOS doesn’t have this issue. Microsoft is a $3.2 trillion company!
The absolute lack of effort they put into Windows is pathetic. They’re a shining example of why monopolies should not be allowed to happen.
They need to finish Settings before doing that. Control Panel is almost always the easier way to accomplish things and still the only way to accomplish some IIRC.
And it doesn’t take years to load, specially on older PCs
And you can have more than one instance open at a time, instead of having the sound page open and when you try to bring up bluetooth next to it it changes the first one instead.
This is so frustrating when trouble shooting - trying to re-find where that one settings page was because you opened another.
It’s not a phone - it’s a windowing desktop environment. Allow multiple instances!
I had to do a lot of configuration work on Win10 computers lately. The MMC, Powershell, even Regedit are faster and more intuitive than Settings. It’s fucking ridiculous.
This. Settings does not have full audio devices information and settings.
Settings in Windows 11 is close. I rarely find myself going to control panel when it was about 50/50 in Windows 10. Still more clicks than I would like but workable.
Oh no. They really want me swapping to Linux full time with this shit, ugh.
What’s stopping you?
Just get it over with.
The setup, mostly. I know I can VM my mandatory work programs, at least. Dual boot has been too frustrating since Windows won’t play ball.
I am glad I waited on dual boot since the recent patch broke that. So, now I’m looking for a good way to just go all in without losing too much data.
I really just need a stable kernel with a decent UI that works with Gaming/Proton AMD CPU and Nvidia GPU.
The distro choices are too expansive and I haven’t had to start fresh in a new OS in 30 years.
Just start with Linux mint and cinnamon or kde desktop environment. You should be good to go with that. Kernels are not something that you usually need to worry about, the default should work fine. If you need to, it’s easy to switch to another kernel by just installing it through the package manager.
Well I spent Sunday night installing Manjaro and so far so good. It’s been almost 30 years since the last time I used Linux, and KDE Plasma is really easy to use.
I decided to wipe my Win 10 drive so there was no going back. I was able to install and play games like normal, and I even used the command line to pull and build the Mullvad VPN App from the Arch store, and sign the app certificate.
The best part was once I setup the steam libraries Steam pulled all the information from those drives and all my games that weren’t on my Windows SSD were ready to go. All of my peripherals just worked and the Nvidia driver was fine.
I’m just missing some GOG Games, but Heroic should take care of that. Painless and simple.
It’s amazing how much has changed in over 20 years.
I’d recommend looking into Bazzite. Built on top of Fedora for rock solid stability and relatively up to date kernel (with all the latest drivers).
They’re shooting for the same stability and high level gaming experience as Steam Deck, but for any computer.
I use Bluefin because I’m less bothered by gaming, but it’s been absolutely fantastic with the stability and ability to run anything I’ve tried.
Well for my work needs I require NVIDIA graphics cards and very high end multi channel audio cards and some other bits and bops. I can dream I can swap one day though.
What are your very high end multi channel audio cards that don’t play together with Jack?
Three of these:
And I got a few other rigs with various rme cards and some focusrite things,
Also there is, yeah you can see the card and it makes sounds, and there is working at a proper level of working, very different unfortunately :(
Ah. Pro Tools.
Yeah I understand Avid isn’t exactly er, avid on the open source stuff.
My apologies and thanks for the education.Oh yeah don’t get me wrong, super not a fan of avid and protools whole thing, but hands are part tired unfortunately :( I am glad I ditched avid stuff for video work many years ago at least, though really am not sure Adobe is the better place to be rofl. One day I would love to have a fully working machine you can use in industry that is entirely Linux!!
Yeah, good luck getting Adobe supporting anything linux. Have pleaded both as customer and as corporate client. Not happening.
Blackmagic has stuff. DaVinci, etc. But apples and oranges.
Do it. I will too. I’ll do a QEMU Vm for my windows needs. I’m done with their behavior.
Sure, once I decide on a more permanent distro. Manjaro was ok but I keep hearing bad things and it was a gaming partition, not an all purpose partition. I’m sure lurking in Linux communities will give me some ideas, though.
Yeah, I got my samba Share setup on my temporary NAS tonight. But after I transfer my files, I’m torn what try as permanent. Been using KDE Neon on my laptop, but it does need to update every boot it seems.
I used Kubuntu on my workstation and liked it. I use ubuntu at work for all my Linux needs there. I’m also really tempted to just make it a proxmox server and turn it into a VM box essentially. Which would make the experience of trying new things or switching back to windows for that inevitable game that won’t work on Linux fairly seamless. But I could also give freebsd another go too, which doesn’t seem like a terrible idea
I could ramble on, but I think I’ll leave it at the realization I really like Debian based distros. If you feel like it let me know what you decide!
THIS was your tipping point. control panel removal.
LMAO
it’s a very good tipping point dude. settings is so complicated to navigate and is very slow. not to mention control panel still has more features than settings
That seems reasonable. Especially since there’s no equivalent to the already half-assed solution that is the control panel on Linux.
OSX style settings menus are far better than either the travesty that is the win 10 settings or the aging and questionably designed control panel, especially when it’s all tightly integrated with the OS and utilities, and that’s present in every Linux DE under the sun.
EDIT: I should clarify that by “already half-assed solution that is the control panel”, I meant that the Windows Control Panel was always a half-assed solution in comparison to what OSX and Linux DEs do with proper settings manager applications.
On Linux DEs, a settings manager like Settings in OSX is usually present, and it is a far better solution.
Can you enlighten me on what is the 'already half-assed solution that is the control panel on Linux" [sic]. That you mean.
Far as I know, there are many a different approaches to half-assed solutions to control panels on Linux [sic].
I phrased that very poorly. I’ll edit the above to clarify.
I meant that the Windows Control Panel was always a half-assed solution in comparison to what OSX and Linux DEs do with proper settings manager applications.
On Linux DEs, a settings manager like Settings in OSX is usually present, and it is a far better solution.
Fair enough. And I didn’t mean it as a slight. Just genuinely curious about what a unified Linux Control Panel might have been like.
This is not to say that the Gnome and KDE (or Plasma) panels (f. ex.) don’t have their varied and myriad shortcomings, but that’s another discussion.
I agree with your point about OS X style menus, they’ve been steadily going downhill since “macOS” though. Granted, they’re still uphill of whatever the fuck Microsoft seems to think of.
My issue with Control Panel is there’s no clear delineation between OS and distribution software and installed software.
On Windows, a program you install at any time may do anything like:
- Have a settings menu inside the application
- Have a separate settings utility install alongside with it that may or may not be accessible from the main application
- Place an applet on the control panel
- A combination of any 2 or 3 of the above
Bonus: App has registry entries it doesn’t tell you about that address options for which there are no GUI representations.
The whole thing is extremely arbitrary and made for a very different world where programs you’d install would be fairly limited in number. Nowadays I have no idea what software runs on my Windows rig and how much of it there is. Between flight simming, racing simming and all the third party crap for all that plus the crap for the peripherals, the endless esoteric drivers for various gear I’ve used for audio and video recording and playback, helper utilities, virtual audio cables, virtual midi cables, virtual ethernet, virtual mouse, virtual GPU etc etc. Recently I found some kind of Sony audio driver on the control panel. Apparently it came with a Sony DAP I used to use that could be used as a DAC.
What makes this worse is that the Control Panel’s actual included items are not standardized in any way. Any applet could have sixteen submenus across three windows and tabs or one. Microsoft was trying to paper over it since Vista and as always just created more barriers. Microsoft is like a slumlord painting over mold and rotting walls with each update.
This just doesn’t happen on Linux.
On Linux a GUI settings manager on Gnome and KDE alike will only feature things relevant to the OS configuration and maybe some for bundled pre-installed software. All the settings menus on Gnome are uniform, and most are uniform on KDE. I talk shit on KDE’s insane defaults (touchpad settings and minimize all windows applet) but I found the right settings immediately.
On Windows, I don’t even know where those settings are, there are some ideas on where I could look but it’s honestly faster to just Google it than to guess around where the touchpad settings are.
Windows’ attempts to implement this through a unified settings menu is to paper over how the settings themselves were made to be configured through a spaghetti of menus on the control panel, and as such when displayed through a unified settings menu the order and groupings come off as completely arbitrary and nonsensical, and then some options are just outright missing from the Settings menu that are present in the control panel.
It provides neither the features existing users expect nor simplicity that would help new users.
What’s worse is that Windows also has to be an ad vessel to make the line go up. Therefore to add to the confusion, the settings menu has to act as a vessel for promoting Microsoft products and thus prominently feature OneDrive, Windows Defender (not even called that anymore), to appear as if they’re integral parts of the OS and not applications and services I can choose to not use.
Surprisingly this is also an issue on iOS. I frequently find useful settings for apps in the iOS settings app and not the actual app. It feels so funny that iOS is this highly polished experience, and then you get some crummy Bullshit Calculator app with “restore premium and-free VIP subscription” in the official settings app. Takes some of the sheen off, for sure.
This isn’t removal, is deprecation.
I’m all for an improved UX but the settings app is not an improved UX, it’s taking many different ways to manage windows features and throwing them into arbitrary categories that are constantly getting shifted around.
How about instead just improving some other Windows control features? Let me filter by name in services.msc and devmgmt.msc. Let me search in gpedit.msc.
I will say I do appreciate that they’ve finally made those features work under HiDPI without looking like a blurry pixelated mess. Only took 14 years since the first mass market HiDPI display was released, and 23 years since the first 4k monitor
Preach. Make an actual improved control panel, settings is garbage. It’s not just scattering things around it really doesn’t include a ton of necessary settings.
Right, the amount of settings you can’t actually change in settings and instead open up a legacy UI modal to change a specific thing is a demonstration that it’s very much lipstick on a pig rather than a core overhaul. There’s so much baggage in keeping Windows backwards compatible for enterprise that I’m not really sure they can get to a point of having a new control panel where everything is organized into a better UI without cutting some of that baggage and doing major refactors, which will break compatibility, and they make the most money from widespread enterprise licenses across massive private and public organizations, not from windows home licenses included with new computers
Most people don’t care about this, and I wish I didn’t, but for whatever reason my brain just hates inconsistency like this, and Windows is the absolute worst for it. It makes me hate using my computer. I’m truly jealous of the people who are completely unfazed by ugly/inconsistent UX, I wish it was a trait I had.
Context menus like this, UI elements from many different windows versions, 5+ UX toolkits in use at any given time, inconsistent padding, inconsistent fonts, inconsistent keyboard shortcuts within MS apps, dark mode preference being listened to for one app and ignored in another.
I hate Apple, have never owned any of their products and likely never will, but they’d be embarrassed if they had a UX this sloppy and inconsistent. They’d straight up not release it, because for all their faults, they do actually value UX consistency.
Linux DEs are far more visually cohesive than Windows (especially the likes of Gnome and ElementaryOS), even KDE which was/is frequently mocked for being a bit ugly and inconsistent has improved leaps and bounds recently and is now far more consistent than Windows. And they’re all working on a combined budget that’s probably less than 1% of Windows’ development budget. Wtf are Microsoft doing??
I like the cut of your jib.
I don’t think this is a real issue in the age of bespoke design for applications. Only a minority of then use the OS widgets for their interface. You can argue that this is a bad thing, but then the context menus are just a tiny portion of the entire issue.
As annoying as it is, I’d rather have visually inconsistent elements rather than broken applications. There’s something to be said for backwards compatibility.
I know people in IT who only use control panel. This will piss people off.
Hot take but anyone who refuses to rethink how things work during their lifetime causes changes to happen at the pace of 1 change per generation.
Of course, in this case, the new thing really is inferior.
I have no problem with change. But I do have a problem with Microsoft’s lack of QC or proper design methodology.
It’s certainly been a long drawn-out mess.
I’m not sure what to say. Settings just doesn’t let you get anything done. Are they going to add all the missing functionality to settings before getting rid of control panel? We all know the answer.
If my company didn’t have a windows mandate I would fully abandon it at this point. What a joke.
Yup. I have 1 app that requires window. That’s all that’s keeping me. That one app. And we’re migrating away from it towards a webif, so it’s only a matter of time.
Let’s be real…Microsoft finally depreciated Windows with Windows 11.
Muahaha now I can prepare for my final form: crotchety old man complaining about how they killed off the control panel.
Become boomer
Just yesterday I wanted to disable sound devices. The button in the settings app even says „turn devices on/off“, but once inside the menu, there is no option to enable or disable sound devices.
Had to use the control panel again.
Mmsys.cpl is the only way for me
Let’s wait for CEOs to learn about the mess of Program Files\Program Files (x86), and how the user directory is filled with links replacing deprecated folders making it unusable. Windows is more of the inverted Babylon tower of hell than a consistent and complete vision of a product, one layer is built on top of another like a patchwork of a clinically insane. That’s with all their $billions, millions of workhours and a market monopoly.
That’s mostly because of backwards compatibility, and it’s a blessing imo.
Or a forward compatibility, since they weren’t obliged to create these new paths, and they did, thus creating a problem for themselves.
They just have to rename, move, and otherwise obfuscate shit. Always in the general direction of worse.
Good god, this is sad to witness. As long as I’ve been using windows, they’ve added duplicates of every single thing, but presented differently, each version being slightly more incapable in slightly different ways. How can a piece of software be so utterly lacking in design and forethought is beyond me, for real.
