I don’t know why I even bother opening the settings app
Because Microsoft went full Apple and adopted the “we know what’s good for you so don’t defy our decisions” philosophy of UX design.
They went full WEF
The difference is that Apple usually executes it well, and Microsoft doesn’t.
You set a Windows PC to dark mode, half of the system is still bright white. Apple wouldn’t dream of doing that shit.
You start searching in the start menu, it’s slow, gives you different results each day, misses a bunch of stuff, and tries to send you to Bing. Apple wouldn’t dream of doing that shit.
Microsoft comes up with a new UX, but it’s only a thin veneer, most of the system doesn’t even use it and instead uses Win7 or earlier menus. Apple wouldn’t dream of doing that shit.
For all their flaws (and believe me I know they have many. I don’t intend to ever own an Apple product), Apple actually gives a shit about having a polished and consistent UX.
They wouldn’t have a dark mode that still leaves half the system white, they wouldn’t have 20+ year old UI cruft, etc.
The issue is that Apple had that mentality from the start. Microsoft tried to Frankenstein it in after the OS had already matured under a different UX philosophy, not only that, they also didn’t commit all the way to changing the philosophy since they still wanted legacy support. They basically ended up with the drawbacks of both philosophies and very little of the benefits of either.
As much as I hate apple, at least apple also caters to power users somewhat. Windows became so, so dumb.
A a Windows and at some points a Mac admin, all I gotta say to that is lol, no.
Whatever you say mate. There’s a reason developers who don’t Linux use macs and not windows.
Because it’s based off of BSD and uses very similar tools to Linux, and because of brainwashing of the Apple cult I guess.
Overall, OSX is a piece of shit OS that is shit to work on. I lasted a year before I just gave it back and got a Windows machine, most unintuitive frustrating OS I’ve ever used. Sure the hardware can seem nice (if it doesn’t break or if you don’t need anything repaired or replaced) but OSX is trash. If you want to use something, use Linux, there are tons of good distros and all of them cater to the power user.
Then why don’t you use Linux? Going from Mac back to Windows is absolutely pathetic.
Because I like Windows, and calling it “pathetic” is like saying OSX is for power users. Lol, just, lol.
I’ve been in the industry for 18 years, I went from an MS Systems Engineer building and managing MS infrastructure for all size companies and enterprises. I’ve been an AWS Cloud Support engineer working mainly on Linux and AWS, I’ve been a devops engineer building and maintaining on prem build systems and web server farms (these used IIS and everything was MS) for a company with insane uptime requirements, I’ve also done similar on AWS with K8s and a whole bunch of other stuff. I’m now a Systems Engineer in a build team for a big company and my primary responsibility is to build and manage the OSX infra we use. During that time I’ve had enough experience of trying to deal with OSX and all it’s BS, which included using a MacBook for a year, that I can say unequivocally that Apple is a shitty company with shitty practices, and Linux can be a pain in the ass to fix when things break in strange ways. But you know what I love about Windows? It just works, I rarely have any issues. If I need Linux, I use WSL or start a VM in the cloud or my machine. I can run pretty much everything I need without issues and I’m a master with PowerShell so can automate anything I need to do on my own PC.
But you know what? You’re completely right, my career is a failure and I’m pathetic because I use Windows. I should go kms now.
I work on OSX build machines every day and the amount of time I have to waste fiddling to get the simplest shit to work is insane. Fuck I hate it so much with every fiber of my body. I can’t even use any cli utils to get disk or network stats because of their dumb security BS, which you can’t disable because it’s cloud hosted.
It’s not that because Microsoft is changing their own UI. IMO this is the typical corporate climber problem all corporations have. No one gets promotions maintaining software. So you get designers changing stuff for the sake of change so it can go on their resume.
I don’t know what Apple did but they murdered System Preferences and made us all watch as they pretended the mutilated corpse with a name tag on still dripping with middle manager cum is better.
no bro just go into terminal and type out this arcane command with 20 options fr fr . easy! (and I use linux on the regular lol)
Slightly better than editing some plist file
I wish home and pro version influenced the setting panes. I get what they’re trying to do with making it look like OSX and Linux and why the “network interface and adapters” probably isn’t helpful for many home users, but I just wanna manage my interfaces here.
I think Network and Sharing Centre was more useful than the shit we have now.
I’ll have you know windows has changed.
Now you can’t move the task bar
Is this real?
ya
But why
Because F*CK THE END USER THAT’S WHY!
For real though, the end user isn’t the client anymore. The user is just cattle in the data collecting herd that they sell to their real clients, advertising and whatnot.
Coding is hard I guess. Gota focus on all that telemetry.
It’s really annoying my task bar has been at the top since workbench 1.1 and I used it to differentiate work and personal pc at a glance as they often share screens for comfort at home
Since Windows 11.
wow, microsoft is really putting all the me-repellants into windows 11 aren’t they
Username checks out.
In 11? I know I still can in 10.
well you still can move the icon’s back to the left atleast
I just reinstalled windows and spent 30 minutrs trying to figure out how to get the normal taskbar back, with label text not just icons, and Jesus wept it turns out
THAT ESSENTIAL FEATURE IS GONE
I am flabbergasted. I don’t know how anyone can use their PC without knowing what windows they have open and easy access to them. It’s insane.
I downloaded my usual start menu replacer in the end, which it turns out had also saved my taskbar at some point when they make this insane change, and I just hadn’t noticed.
That’s not even mentioning that when windows first installed it had all the icons in the MIDDLE for some insane reason. They must be smoking some strong stuff over there.
I clicked the button in the bottom left, you know, the button that has always been the start menu button, for 30 years, and it brought up the weather or some shit.
When you have to start searching for the start menu you know you’ve fucked up. Christ it was awful.
I know they make a big deal of saying “Windows 10 will be our last numbered windows release” but I really hope Windows 12 fixes all this crap.
Even more recently, my right click alt menu has become weird and much more annoying, hiding the actual menu I want behind a “see more options” button, and I can’t even use the keyboard to scroll through options and hit return to select one like I have my whole life. No, for some reason that menu is mouse only, and doesn’t even have keyboard key shortcuts.
They’re just stripping core features out left and right, and making everything harder to get at. It’s madness.
What next? They’ll get rid of the desktop?!
im not trusting going past 11
win11 has labels tho, you’re lying
Only 23 years?
I don’t think this bad lad has changed since Windows 3.1
3.11 but yeah
3.11 as 3.1 had no networking capability.
Whenever I saw that old dialog it felt like a comfort blanket… that won’t ever let you go and entangle you in it’s comfy iron grip.
So fucking annoyed at the taskbar overflow shit in Windows now. I don’t want it hiding any of my system tray icons…I want to see what’s running and I don’t care how it looks. Every time certain apps update themselves, I have to go in again and select that particular app to hide itself with no way to tell Windows to just stop trying to hide system tray icons altogether. I’ve told it to hide Discord and the Xbox app probably 20 times each now and it conveniently forgets my decision every app update.
I am really going to miss the old settings when they finally remove what is left of Control Panel. So far they have removed things or moved shit to force the Settings app. But they keep failing to make the new things have anywhere near the level of control. The power settings from Control Panel still matter way more than Settings and seem to actually stick when applied. And I just really have no idea how they have made stuff like resetting networking/connection issues worse over time. Fucking right-clicking on the networking icon on the taskbar and picking “repair” would actually get shit working again 8 times out of 10. But just seems to be a placebo at this point. There are still so many times that using different resets in Internet Options fixes more stuff I see regularly than the resets in Settings->Networking.
And the newer Troubleshooting options never fix any of the Windows Update issues I come across. Just a glorified verification of the failures I already know are happening. I never thought I would so badly miss being able to tell Windows Update to ignore updates if they were bugging out (not to avoid them all together but at least stop the OS from just constantly going through the motions of installing and failing during each reboot/shutdown). So many of the updates that used to give me issues were really either down to them trying to install out of order or due to a fuck-up on MS’s end that pushed bad updates.
The push to so deeply embed these AI models into everything so fast is really pissing me off. Shit is known to have issues with just outright making shit up. Which is IMO reason enough to not be adding them to end-products (especially since the end-products are also still not finished with removing old versions of things). One thing that really worries me in my job with fixing people’s PCs is the AI and search that pushes web content (and the now inescapable placement of ads) above local resources/programs/settings/etc. The main issues people have aren’t actual viruses like in the past. It is the massive levels of scams and fake alerts followed by fake “repair techs.” If the average person is so easy to trick when it is people scamming them. AI is going to blow shit up waaaaaaaay worse and will be able to do it so much faster and completely. Average people are still under the impression that these AI chats are giving completely real and accurate information (reminds me of how people used to believe that if something was said on TV that it was real).
Shit is fucked and going to get much worse at a dramatically faster rate due to rushing things in order to make as much money as fast as possible. Even Microsoft used to ship things in a more complete state. But gaming has made shipping broken products completely normal. So no reason to care about keeping any level of quality.
Oh man your whole comment speaks to me.
And the newer Troubleshooting options never fix any of the Windows Update issues I come across.
I was fighting with this just last night. Ended up having to follow an official Microsoft guide on how to shrink my system partition by 250MB, remove the recovery partition and set up a new one with 250MB more space just so that windows update could actually install the newest update. Fortunately I enjoy dicking around with my computer and can afford to make a mistake that might trash my windows install but for others that rely on their machine this stuff has to be daunting and frustrating.
I was honestly excited about the new Settings when Windows 10 arrived. I was a Windows sysadmin for more than a decade and am intimately familiar with control panel and think it sucks. I hoped Settings would modernize and streamline. But here we are, so many years later, and many common tasks still lead us to control panel. Such disappointment.
And I just really have no idea how they have made stuff like resetting networking/connection issues worse over time.
While I generally agree with your comment, they did add an option (don’t know how long it’s been there) where you can right-click on the Internet icon, click the troubleshooter, and there’s a button immediately right there in the troubleshooter to reset the adapter.
Dude I got fucking livid yesterday because Alt keyboard shortcuts no longer work in Paint.
You have to interact with the ribbon before the alt key works.
And then there’s no key shortcut for “Save As” or “Exit”.
The fuck Microsoft. They weren’t hurting anyone and you’re wrecking 30 years of muscle memory. You know how frustrating that is?
Haha I ran into this a few months ago. I too was losing my fucking mind over this
Honestly if I hadn’t switched to Linux 10 years ago I would’ve said that this would be the thing to set me off and switch. (This was my work computer, and even though Ubuntu is available, Linux users are second-class citizens in my shop…all sorts of weird issues and not nearly enough support because it’s a very limited offering)
It’s incredibly frustrating. It’s more than muscle memory at this point, it’s practically instinct. It’s so anti-user and there’s no reason to do it except to bring paint into the fold of all the other ribbon office apps, as if people haven’t been complaining about everything wrong about ribbon for what, 8 years now?
windows 7-style control panel is one of the most non intuitive uis ever created
I agree.
We’re both going to get downvoted but the settings app has a much better UI than control panel full stop. The problem is the years of development that have gone into it only for the settings app to redirect to the control panel anyway for 50% of the things you want to do because they still haven’t been bothered to actually integrate everything directly into the app.
If you could actually do everything in the settings app that you could do in the control panel after 3 versions of windows I don’t think it would be so universally disliked.
win11 settings app can do a lot on it’s own, most network settings can now be configured there (except if you need to configure some obscure protocol or sth) DHCP, DNS, static/dynamic ipv4/ipv6 options, DoH both per-adapter and per-network are there
It’s the same as M365, and they’re always changing where things are located and renaming things. So stupid.
If you could actually do everything in the settings app that you could do in the control panel after 3 versions of windows I don’t think it would be so universally disliked
This was my biggest gripe with the settings app when I still used Windows
I use linux now, and for someone like me who likes to tinker and script, it has been amazing
Isn’t this what the whole post is about? Not having all the settings / info in the new settings?
I’ve got fed up of them changing how many hoops you go through to get to the old settings so I have the .cpl commands memorized that work no matter what computer you’re at
Appwiz.cpl ncpa.cpl for common examples
im planning to switch from windows 11 to linux mint in 2026
Why not sooner?
because if i say it it’s gonna be 2026 then it’s gonna hard to make me say 2024
Unpopular opinion: Linux Mint sucks ass and there are so many great distros to choose from, which aren’t Linux Mint. It looks like Windows XP and functions like Windows XP. Still uses X11, which doesn’t even have proper support for 1:1 touchpad gestures and handles multiple displays with different scaling factors and refresh rates in a way that is, well, hacky and janky at best or non-functional at worst.
I get that Linux Mint is easy to use because it’s made specifically to be as convenient as possible to users coming from Windows but jeez, it looks and feels like something from 2005, especially on a laptop…
I love Debian 12 with GNOME, and the things Ubuntu has done to make what would be by far the best desktop UX across Linux. After 6 years of Ubuntu, I am not particularly very attached to the Start menu paradigm.
Mint is very meh. Zorin is way better for the whole Start menu paradigm and Windows XP/7 aesthetic. If you have to pick Mint, atleast pick LMDE with GNOME, not KDE.
Linux Mint might look outdated but it’s stable as hell. Especially LMDE. Any time I mess around with arch/arch-based derivatives or any rolling release distros I’m quickly reminded why I chose to run Mint as my primary OS. I’m long past my distro hopping days so having something that works without question and doesn’t require any mucking around is huge for me.
It’s s gateway drug. It’s ok to let them come in on Mint and Ubuntu, they’re scared and confused. Give them creature comforts. Once they’re warm and fuzzy, they’ll get inquisitive and branch out.
Regale to the Mint users the virtues of your better choices, but tell the windows users come on it and use whatever they’re comfortable with.
I’ll take something from 2005 as a compliment to Linux Mint. Having installed it in 2006 you are absolutely correct. It’s shockingly boring lack of constant UI paradigm shifts almost makes me forget about the OS completely. I’m at the point in my Linux journey where I see slow adoption of new things as good. I accept others have setups that mint does not work for, but I would wager there is no Linux DE better suited as a first suggestion to try depending on the newness of the hardware. If you have 5 monitors of differing resolutions and frame rates then sure, there are better DEs.
I’ve just started to daily drive Mint, after finding Fedora confusing and Ubuntu somehow slow and stuttery.
Every few years I try out Linux desktop and this is the first time I’ve found it usable enough for me. For the first time I’m not delving into forum posts from last decade to get simple stuff working.
What distro would you recommend that does desktop usability better than Mint?
I use debian and am very happy with it. It runs just fine on an 3-4 year old laptop (thinkpad).
I don’t daily drive Linux myself yet, but I see a lot of people talking up Pop!OS
I used Mint when I first started playing around with Linux about a decade ago and it was pretty good. But I recently tossed it on a laptop that I primarily just wanted to run a web browser and have minimal faffing about and I’ve been extremely impressed with how it’s matured.
The DE is snappy and unobtrusive with extremely sane defaults. The software center is extremely usable and has very nice flatpak integration, their replacement desktop utilities for the Gnome utilities they once used are very full featured and don’t get in your way, and in most cases where Canonical built their own tool that nobody else uses, Mint has already swapped it with the standard tool. If your goal is to just get a Linux desktop going with minimal faffing about Mint has really become a brilliant choice to do so with
linux mint is working on wayland
Just do it now, you won’t regret it, or install mint in a virtual machine and full screen it and get use to it, you’ll find yourself using windows less and less every day. My personal go to is Kubuntu, because I like the customization capabilities and lower memory footprint than Gnome. I hate tiling windows managers, so don’t recommend those please.
According to Dave Plummer, a retired Windows Engineer, there are actually bugs in some of the windows components because he intended for them to be temporary solutions, like the CPU or Hard Drive usage numbers had to be Massaged to be lower than 100%, for example. When the Task Manager doesn’t respond you can actually use Ctrl+Shift+Esc to queue up a new Task Manager if the old one doesn’t revive itself. That stuff hasn’t changed since 1996.
He also wrote the File Formatter, which has a file size limit of 32Gb for the Fat32 format for the same reason: it wasn’t supposed to be permanent, but it hasn’t changed for over 20 years. The concept at the time was that Cluster Slack would make a large drives like a terabyte more than 99% wasted space in the format, so 32Gb was arbitrarily chosen as a limit.
I went to go disable my nic.
It needed a reboot to take effect.
The fuck? I only want to turn it off because I’m testing something and I need a change of ip to test an application and I’m feeling lazy, so I turn off the nic to go to wifi. Good enough? Nope.
So stand up and unplug the cord.
Cool. Switched over. Test didn’t work as expected. Plug cord back in.
Next day computer reboots for updates and I’ve got no internet. Go crazy trying to figure out what it was then remember it needed a reboot to disable the nic.
fyi Dave was involved in some scareware bullshit as one of the main actors and sued for it. Fuck this guy.
Very unfortunate to hear. I wonder how much of his YT Channel were lies?
I aggree. I really liked his videos until came across this info (back then on reddit).
Thanks for looking this up ❤️
Dave’s youtube channel is great for these stories from back in the day. Link for the lazy: https://www.youtube.com/@DavesGarage
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://www.piped.video/@DavesGarage
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
file size limit of 32Gb for the Fat32 format
The limit was a 4GB limit, tho
They’re talking about the overall size, not the per file size limit.
The limit on formatting drives as fat32 is 32GB on windows though anything above 32GB and you have to go find a 3rd party tool to convert larger disks to fat32
He also wrote the File Formatter, which has a file size limit of 32Gb for the Fat32 format for the same reason: it wasn’t supposed to be permanent, but it hasn’t changed for over 20 years.
I was thinking about this recently, so it is a bug, not a feature
If it has been a bug for 20+ years, we can safely say it’s a feature for backwards compatibility.
I mean, it was intentional in a way, so the definition of bug is hazy, but the functioning version would be the ExFAT format.
But the problem isn’t in Fat32 itself, as you can format larger disks in that format just fine
Yes, the final line of my comment explains that, it’s just that the cluster size in Fat32 has a lower bound so if you have files smaller than the cluster then they take a whole cluster, and that can lead to cluster slack that is vast majority wasted space.
I went to go disable my nic.
It needed a reboot to take effect.
The fuck? I only want to turn it off because I’m testing something and I need a change of ip to test an application and I’m feeling lazy, so I turn off the nic to go to wifi. Good enough? Nope.
So stand up and unplug the cord.
Cool. Switched over. Test didn’t work as expected. Plug cord back in.
Next day computer reboots for updates and I’ve got no internet. Go crazy trying to figure out what it was then remember it needed a reboot to disable the nic.
Remember when they planned to move over all the Control Panel settings to the Settings app?
In Windows 10?
I still extensively use:
Win+R
ncpa.cpl
It’s still the only way I know how to easily and quickly change my NIC settings.
The worst part is to change some things it adds like an extra 4 clicks to the old method.
You can reduce keystrokes on that. Just tap the Win key instead of Win+R. Type ncpa.cpl and hit enter.
If you work on as many servers and desktops as I do, you’ll eventually encounter machines that have slow loading start menus and search, or search the web for some stupid ass reason instead. I’ll save that time with adding R. Still a 1 handed move anyhow
or search the web for some stupid ass reason
The reason was actually documented at the end of Halo 3; when Cortana got rampancy and subsequently infected all of our windows 10 start menus.
If you’re such a server and desktop expert, why are you not setting a GPO to disable the start menu web features??
If you’re such a server and desktop support expert, how do you gpo random client that call in, or new client and environments when you know nothing about them, or friend and families computers?
Listen, kid, when you’ve been in the game long enough you’ll come across unique scenarios enough to a point where it is God damn annoying.
Also who the hell GPOs network settings?
Kid. Lol. I’ve been in the game since before the invention of Windows servers
The start menu searching the web isn’t a network setting. It’s a setting for the behavior of the start menu.
You change a single flag in the registry on Windows and it tells the Start Menu not to do the behavior of searching the web. The unusual scenario as you cannot it is a common feature that can be turned on and off. The GPO lets you set that flag administratively. It’s not unique, and it’s something my level 1 help desk guys under my teams had no problem learning.
You’ve either been in the game long enough to become senile or the more likely case is your the kid and have no idea what you’re doing.
Bonus: there’s another flag to set the Start Menu to not search files. Set that one too and the search is lightning fast and only shows you programs and settings options.
I’m 90% sure that is the only way to change settings past just showing what you are connected to. Does/can anyone actually use settings over the control panel tools?
I still don’t know this and we are already talking windows 12 lol
Windows 11 had a link to that in under the advanced network options.
I say had as a recent update just took it away. They added a new advanced settings to replace the network connections part you linked to, but it is still missing options. Almost 10 years of the new settings and still no way to enable split tunneling on a vpn in the new UI.
The worst part is to change some things it adds like an extra 4 clicks to the old method.
And then at the final click, it takes you to that control panel screen anyway lol
And this here is the icing on the cake, isn’t it?
*unwilling
Really annoying start search that doesn’t go to the control panel programs but opens bing search instead, also the right control panel features are not linked from the new 2024 system app ui WTF
Everything I need is configurable through PowerShell for years. Why bother with UI? Win 7, 10 or 11 - it’s all the same.
Yeah I’ve been a mixed environment sysadmin for many years and still to keep need a Windows desktop at home and powershell makes it all happen. I basically do a complete debloat of my install and and all that. I actually like the overall Windows 11 desktop environment but omg the bloatware is insane I don’t know how people use it without knowing how to clean it up.
Enterprise editions don’t have bloat, no need to do much :)
Very true! Enterprise iso and MAS and basically done. My previous builds have mostly all been Enterprise edition and I’d definitely go that route if I knew 11 was gonna be so bad. A part of me was curious after hearing so much hate, and I didn’t mind learning how to remove it all because I could see it coming in useful for helping others, it was a good way to get exposed to all of it and I found some helpful tools I can send to people now.
Because I don’t have all the commands to do everything memorized. Also powershell versions and compatibility / features have changed a lot over the years.
Not to say that Powershell is a bad thing in any way, it is quite useful for the stuff I do at work. But it is a mess just like the rest of MS.
Can it list available settings that could be changed, because if so it is an almost perfect replacement for the settings app?
