In favor of what? I still have to use control panel because some things are seemingly unreachable by the "settings" menus.
Yeah. This sounds a lot like some PM type thinks they're gonna get rid of control panel, and they just don't know what all is actually in there.
And not to mention the custom control panel applets hanging around out there from who-knows-what vendors.
I don't think that the PM is wrong. They absolutely can get rid of the control panel. It's the user who will suffer ✌
I wonder if there would be a way to "embed" those old panel applets into the new settings somehow.
I bet they at most remove control.exe or make it open the Settings app, but still allow launching old vendor .cpl items just like they already can be opened in Control Panel.
This is already implemented on a lot of the settings pages on 11.
Edit: just wanted to add I don't think well. I use it at work.
Windows is king at being inconsistent 🔥
If only they had trained advanced users to use the CLI that would never change unlike the GUI
And not to mention the custom control panel applets hanging around out there from who-knows-what vendors.
AMD FirePro and Catalyst users are going to probably stay on an older version of the OS, considering most of those users are going to be educational institutions, engineering workshops, makerspaces/hackerspaces etc.
Can't think of any other vendor products that integrated quite as much into the legacy control panel area
I'm thinking of highly niche industrial and embedded products who are likely to be left behind.
A major traditional selling point for Windows has always been the backwards compatibility.
That's M$ intention, to hide some settings from users and lose control of Windows.
Right, I forgot, MS doesn't want you to have control what programs are doing or how your computer works. Corporate way or....linux.
I may be technologically challenged but Microsoft has been steadily selling me on linux ever since windows 10.
Linux is just straight up easier to use than an unfucked windows.
See, that may be the case. Or it might not be. It's a risk vz reward right now. I am not good with computers and have had my PC, laptop, phone and smart watch, inexplicably break, get stuck on boot and had to have them repaired. I just know my mistakes are easier to screw up my computer and data on linux. So the worse MS gets, the more I am willing to risk it.
It’s probably all in the registry somewhere.
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.
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.
I'm pretty positive on mac OS, as an OS it's technically quite good, but their preferences app has always been atrocious almost entirely for this reason, I want to have two preferences windows open to different pages please..
I hear you. I have always been a power user so I was pretty shocked when you could not open two file managers at once in OSX.
The thing about Apple devices is they work great, as long as you do it they way they want.
You can have multiple finder windows in OSX, thats perfectly normal, but you cant have the network settings open next to the printer settings.
Well that was not the case with the last time I used OSX. You click on finder and it would not open a second window. This is not how Windows or Gnome/Kwin work.
you have been able to right click (or i guess two finger click for apple people) and open a second window forever.
Yeah, like I was saying. You have to do it the way they want rather than just click on it like every other GUI.
One thing I really did like was the use of the drop down menu. I really appreciate all programs using the same basic interface.
I absolutely hated all the Microsoft Ribbon bar nonsense. They have reinvented it so many times you never know where to find anything.
As admin and tech support, I use the control panel constantly. I use the settings app... for display configuration, I guess?
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.
Yeah the new interface has restrictions it doesn’t tell you about until you try to apply new settings.
You can now reach the network connections folder, using an option on the network status page. It's something like advanced network options. Still all the classic stuff, but avoids "control panel." I'm going to guess links like that are not going to be removed.
If they just outright remove all of that, you really will need to learn how to do everything in powershell.
The goal is to move you to powershell
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.
Thus why im moving to 11. Lots of the PCs I work with are still 10 though.
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.
I know, I still have to touch Windows at work.
Windows: Only when paid to touch it.
The first thing I did after getting my work laptop was to install Linux. I am so glad that my work allows it.
I too am limited by the technology of our time
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 have friends who work in IT and would probably slam their head against the wall if they had to deal with Control Panel being removed.
Are Microsoft deliberately trying to make the fabled Year of the Linux Desktop finally become a reality? Because I feel like we're two or three more dumbfuck business moves away from this...
I have a PC at home that works perfectly fine. Browses the internet, emulates GameCube and Dreamcast, runs any app I need.
It's not eligible for Windows 11. In about a month MS will just stop supporting my PC, and it will not have the option to be a Windows PC despite still having plenty of service time to offer.
Microsoft is basically forcing that PC to run Linux instead.
Windows 10 is being supported until next October, you've got more than a month. That said, I've been on Linux for just over a month and I'm so much happier with it. I really like KDE Plasma as a desktop environment. I made the leap because I was unhappy with Windows, but at this point I genuinely prefer Linux.
Ah. Thank you!! I was planning to disconnect the computer from wifi next month until I got around to setting up Linux. Nice to know there is more time.
I used Mint like 15 years ago trying to set up retropie on a cheap netbook. It felt really smooth, but I couldn't get something to work and just never had time to research a resolution.
I'm sure it's more user friendly now or at least the tools are more successful on first install. Going to find out sooner or later. I really just use that old PC to store pictures and play retro games, so it shouldn't be hard to convert with a little time for research.
If you're coming from Windows I recommend Fedora KDE Spin. If has a similar look and feel and is very up to date while remaining stable.
Thank you for the recommendation!
KDE really is nice. It can be a little bit buggy when messing with themes and panels and stuff but overall its nice. I've got it looking like waybar and I'm really enjoying it.
Which distro are you on? Plasma has reached it's 6.0 version I think now. I used it back in the day and KDE apps are really more powerful than their GNOME counterparts.
Don't sweat "what distro" so much. All the major distros offer the same desk tops. So pick a distro you like and just download the KDE Plasma spin of it and enjoy.
Bazzite, it's based on immutable Fedora. But it made sense for my use case because it's one of the more consistent at working out of the box with Nvidia graphics cards and I wanted the gaming stuff, but Plasma should be more or less the same everywhere. I'm not sure which version of Plasma it's running but Bazzite is generally pretty up to date with everything but I can't check right now.
Can confirm, want to change your domain or computer name?
Windows 7/10: control panel , system , computer name tab.
Windows 10 /11: control panel, system, windows settings, advanced system settings, old system control panel, computer name tab.
Why add a middle man??
That many steps? WindowsKey+Break > Change computer name.
If you're okay with three steps, on Windows 10 and newer, you can right click the start menu and generally open system. Just about any version supports right clicking "My Computer" or "This PC" and selecting properties, as well.
win+X, then the letter for system. probably s or y but not sure. i use win+x, a all the time for an admin ps window
I use powershell for this. I was just stating the click through steps.
But that would require effort to learn to do something different. And a lot of users are firmly against that notion.
Just like the new shitty right click menu.
There is no reason to reinvent the wheel just because.
And there is no reason not to either. You would still be looking at the cli in Unix with that attitude.
I don't know about that one, It would be really hard to teleconference though the terminal.
Bourne was from 1977-1979, bash which was heavily inspired/designed to replace was from 1989. It is still the default shell in ubuntu.
Open Start or hit Win+R- type sysdm.cpl. Done. They kill off the easy to click icon in Control Panel, but they leave the stuff in still. I doubt they'll remove them. Or at least hope not, lol. Settings is such a cluster to go through.
Next time I write my ver 5 of my admin program I'll add that in!
slam their head against the wall
I already do that enough as it is with Windows 11...
I've been using linux for about a decade. I only know how to maintain my system and google when troubles arise. I'm pretty comfortable with my setup and would love to see many make that jump as well. However, I have to concede that corporate environments add a whole another dimension to the problem.
Control panel largely accrued content - it is generally navigated via left and right click which works great and is stable. Things don't vanish.
Settings, on the other hand, is left click only navigation mostly. It also changed constantly (usually for the worst) - tutorials written 2 years ago are no longer valid because access to that setting was removed. This makes using settings to fix things a real nightmare.
But luckily each item has a lot of "maybe you were looking for X or Y" at the bottom since you can't find anything in there. So just click anywhere, and scroll to the bottom and you'll find what you want in 2 or 3 screens.
Unless it's been removed. Then you just ask the resident IA.
Windows is so easy!
I run SuSE btw.
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...
Gone in favor of a less useful interfacePowershell commands. Fantastic!
Great, now I'll have to Google Bing for a four-line command when before I could just dig through a few menus.
I mean, if there's still gonna be command line commands for all the features then there's no reason why a 3rd party couldn't make a gui app for them and recreate the control panels app
they should call it, get this, control panel
For the investor's sake, I think it should be called the HyperPanel
Good point ... unless MS manages to cripple that capability somehow.
That's a hot take for Lemmy.
Nah, PowerShell is just a shitty bash wannabe
Actually PowerShelll is basically a wrapper for .NET classes... and it doesn't really emulate Bash in any functional way.
The little time I have spent on powershell, I found it to be very slow. The input is also very verbose.
I'm sure someone will say it allows one to be specific but I can be equally specific in bash as well.
It's like the Java Enterprise of scripting language.
It is verbose. It's intended to be readable by untrained people, with a consistent verb-subject format for commands (e.g. Get-ChildItem, Set-Variable), though it turns out that concept doesn't scale very well and the format gets increasingly broken when you get into the Azure PowerShell commands (New-AzLoadBalancerInboundNatRuleConfig).
The real power of PowerShell is that it can interact with .NET directly (because it is .NET), which allows you to quickly and easily build scripts for anything that uses .NET (like Windows). For instance, you can view or edit registry keys of other systems through a PowerShell remote session (using the .NET RegistryKey class), and set up a loop to edit a registry key across a list of machines remotely (I used to do this while managing on-prem AD groups in my last job, it's much faster and easier than trying to change registry keys through remote desktop sessions, more reliable because it's programmatic, and you can easily log the command output and catch any systems that failed to accept the change).
PowerShell might not be what Bash is for the average Linux user, but it's a massive improvement for managing Windows systems at scale. Anyone who works in corporate IT should learn PowerShell.
For instance, you can view or edit registry keys of other systems through a PowerShell remote session (using the .NET RegistryKey class)
It's like a built-in Ansible equivalent (the configuring and management part at least). I'll agree that's neat. If I managed a fleet of Windows machine, I would properly learn that.
But I don't think it's something for the average home user. And the Linux way of configuring remote machines is too easy.
Ah, so it sucks even harder
Powershell has a completely different approach of working with commands than traditional Unix shells. You pretty much don't know what you are talking about.
Look, if it's not a file, I don't want to have anything to do with it.
That's fine, I also pretty much prefer standard Unix tools, due to how efficient they are, but you can't just say made up stuff with no valid explanation, because Powershell has still nothing to do with bash.
Powershell at first seems to be weird and clunky, but after you get used to its syntax you can quickly look up and use its commands without much guessing.
Finally linux will have parity in useability with windows.
No, it's already more usable. You're not bound to a GUI or hidden, indiscoverable incantations.
I felt the /s was implied but clearly enough people actually believe that linux is only for people who master arcane command lines that it could be taken as a genuine belief.
There are PowerShell fanboys here. Anything is possible.
...and after a decade accuse Linux community for copying their great innovations.
Well then it's guess which is the one to use now or which os those commands are naively installed and which need to be installed
No. Don't worry, they moved the controls to the edge browser! Isn't that great 😃? 👍👍👍.
This will bring so many people to Linux and will force so many others to start their own OSes.
Unfortunately, most Windows users are not tech savy and will never move to Linux, regardless of how user-friendly Linux becomes. It would take large-scale retailers switching their computers to have Linux pre-installed instead of Windows before any meaningful transition happens.
Not tech savy person here who's interested in switching to Linux but afraid of fucking it up and the one guy I knew in real life who used Linux and would've helped me out died during covid so I'm on my own.
My old computer won't support windows 11 and I'm not in a position to upgrade my hardware. I've been poking around trying learn about linux but I'm more of a hands on learner so basically I'm going to have to learn as I go which is quite scary for someone who's never even seen a computer running it.
Got an extra USB stick and an old laptop kicking around you're okay with wiping? Ideally 4GB RAM but 2GB would be okay. Start with Linux Mint and follow their installation guide - verifying the ISO image in Windows is probably the toughest part.
Or make absolutely certain you're on the official Mint website, torrent it and don't bother checking, I'm not your mother. "Who the f**k checks those anyway?" (Mint hasn't been hacked since, but it's part of why they're pushing verifying, they know that their users have been targeted before. Also if something goes wrong with the download the install will fail and you'll waste more time than if you just checked.)
If you don't have a spare computer, a live USB can let you try Linux without making changes to your computer, but it's going to be slow - a proper install is going to be a much nicer experience. If you're okay without persistence (ie you can't change anything or install additional programs for the next time you boot into it), just follow the Linux Mint website's installation guide and stop before the actual install step. For persistence, try this method instead, but you really don't want to use it long term, USB sticks aren't designed for this.
Once you've tried it live and you think you like the desktop environment, but if you're not sure you're ready to fully commit, if your computer has an extra slot for an SSD you could buy a second one and dual boot, that's what I did. (Dual booting on the same drive is doable but more of a headache, and even on a different drive Windows doesn't always play nicely.)
Thank you much for this! I really appreciate that you took the time write all of that out
I do have an old laptop I can use for learning on, don't know why it didn't occur to me to try linux on that first, but I'll definitely do that, follow your instructions and see how it goes.
I genuinely want to switch, just didn't have the confidence to actually try. Thank you again for the great advice! I gotta go dig out that old laptop.
If you aren't ready to fully commit to installing it on a hard drive, you could probably make a live USB stick of Linux. There are installers built to run on windows that will install Linux onto a USB drive, which you can boot from after turning off your PC. That way, you don't need to worry about wiping or resetting an old computer just to see if you like it.
Thank you for the info! Thats a great way to get an introduction to linux so can I poke around and get used to it. Appreciate the advice!
Ask ChatGPT. 3.5 should know it. I know I could install FreeBSD because of it.
I've finally made one tiny step into the Linux pool: Replacing my little old Plex server & NAS (mini PC, Windows 10) with... an even tinier Raspberry Pi 5.
It's been nice to finally have an excuse to start learning Linux: commands, bash scripts, ssh, samba shares, etc. I've always admired lean, portable FOSS, so it's way overdue.
I honestly wouldn't mind the new interface if it at least has all the options and functionality from the control panel, but it doesn't - there's so much functionality you can only access via control panel
And this is my gripe.
They can just make an AI called "Control" that will handle all the settings for everyone.
Control Panel will likely be on hospice for a few more years
And I’ll keep visiting Control Panel in hospice. Bite me Microsoft.
WTF why did I misread your comment as "Chris Parnell"
Probably because we were just watching Archer bro
No, I'm watching Cars 3
yessssssssssssssssss
It'd be fine if 1) everything from Control Panel is implemented and properly working and 2) everything stays consistent (because otherwise, as other folks have mentioned, at one point written tutorials even with screenshots quickly become obsolete). I don't see this happening any time soon.
Maybe instead of that they can start encouraging people to use the command line, although even fewer settings are reachable though there.
Their settings pages are the worst; full of white space, finding what they considered "advanced" settings is usually a pain in the ass, and everything is dumbed down to a mind-numbing extent.
I've hated Settings pages with a passion since they were introduced, and always typed the full .msc I was looking for.
I really hate that you can only open one settings page at a time. There is no justification to making you lose your place you’re working on just because you want to adjust another minor setting. With the old interface I can e.g. have network and sound settings open at the same time and I don’t know why they took that away.
I have been able to live with everything else, but this is the one that kills me every time.
the loss of info density in favor of making everything fingerable has been one of the worst things to happen to anyone slightly inclined at managing systems. i hate trying to manage things in a touch based UI. so much fucking scrolling and wasted space. it does look nice , but fuck is it a productivity killer.
I also dislike the design layout. Eg. I much prefer the control panel version of Disk Management than the settings purely from an aesthetics stand point. Each disk and their partitions are just easier to see and differentiate from others.
Maybe instead of that they can start encouraging people to use the command line
LOL, there's no more common phobia among Windows users than the CLI. EVERY Linux discussion "BUT ZOMG CLI COMMANDS!" (when realistically a novice user can avoid them most of the time, and they absolutely are more efficient for helping someone via lemmy post or similar than figuring out what version of what DE they have and trying to tell them the 12 clicks they need to do for the same task)
No joke. Opening a command line from windows by itself is considered hacking by many. Even toggling dark mode in websites triggers that fear.
"OMG. Are you a hacker?"
"...I'm just using Powershell."
between the powershell push, wsl, and sudo for windows they are pushing command line usage for advanced users though
I can't argue with that, but I still take exception to the idea that only advanced users should be willing/able/unafraid to use the CLI. (not that I'm suggesting that you personally are pushing that viewpoint)
When you click a button, you have to read and interpret the label on that button, then hope the person who programmed it actually did program it to do what it is labeled to suggest, and sometimes even well meaning devs make this ambiguous. Plus, you have to FIND the button, which is kinda the subject of many of the discussions here in this very thread.
You go learn what ls does one time, and now you know how to list the contents of a directory. Spend two minutes each learning ps aux and grep, and now you know how to find process info for firefox (or whatever), plus you don't need to know more than the very most basic things about grep to use it to search a text or conf file for a particular string. Or learn the ffmpeg command that you use most often for recursively processing a directory full of video files, and now you don't spend 20 minutes mucking around with handbrake or whatever when prepping files to toss onto your Kodi box (I'm just pulling that one out of my butt). Hell, yt-dlp for downloading videos from just about anywhere is better than any gui tool I ever used.
I think it's totally valid for people to prefer a gui, but I find it a little foolish that so many people just seem to intentionally shut off their brain when presented with a CLI - it's different than clicking buttons, and it's not always superior, but it should absolutely not be the bogeyman that many treat it as. You can probably learn less than ten commands to just a minimal level of proficiency and get a LOT done.
I guarantee you they've only ported over about half of the Control Panel's features. The common stuff, sure. The rest...
Talking about consistency, technically Windows still has UI elements from 3.1 era at Atleast couple of obscure places.
it's simply a special folder you can enable that exposes most of Windows' admin, management, settings, and Control Panel tools in a single, easy-to-scroll-through interface
It's very easy to set this up, and it also works in Windows 11. Even if Microsoft removes access to the normal Control Panel, I seriously doubt this will be taken out.
I used to love HowToGeek, but I sadly see that now that's also enshittified (not the article you linked, but the most recent ones).
Worse, if you go to their articles via their newsletter, it redirects to aws.me domain in the middle which uBlock Origin blocks. You need to manually allow that subdomain to let it run. Plus, they now and then nudge you to create a free account to read more articles.
Oh, did I mention there is a Premium tier of their site as well? Ironical that as the site's editorial quality is coming down, the shittiness is increasing. I think originally one guy used to run it and write articles there. It was relatively frugal (compared to the churn of articles that they process today) and higher quality.
Yes, I remember the guy writing there. That was a serious website! But maybe he sold it to somebody else before Google completely killed their search engine.
Now, if you want to rank well on Google, you either have to churn out stupid articles filled with SEO junk every single day.
I know this but they can break it as well if they do remove it not only hide it ( class ids ). For me it's plain as the new windows settings are dead slow and it won't be usable if your computer is under very heavy load. Only cmd, maybe powershell and maybe sys internals will be what's left for you
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.
So in six months, someone will have written a third-party Windows Control Panel.
Nah it'll just be shoved into PowerToys.
Which is becoming a must have on windows.
Honestly wouldn't even be that difficult to build. Windows is just a GUI for Powershell anyway.
So how many different locations am I going to have to click through to get the settings done now??
Well, one less, because the place where they all are won't be there anymore.
Angry up vote.
Each setting you will have to type into the windows search that is progressively getting worse.
If they actually move all the settings over to the "new" settings app (it's actually 12 years old now): good.
It's an absolute joke that there are multiple settings apps in windows, with design inconsistency across them, and it being a crapshoot whether the screen you look at will support dark mode or not (can you tell I'm tired of being blinded on evenings by unexpected white windows? Lol).
If they don't move all the settings over: bad.
Yeah they're usually niche, but some of those options are needed!
Since this is Microsoft we're talking about, it's probably going to be the latter, unfortunately. "Oh you want to adjust some network settings? That's not in our settings app, and we've retired the control panel – you actually need to open Run and type ncpa.cpl"
It truly made no sense to me when they started the process of migrating stuff from control panel to the "new" Metro-style Settings, then just kind of... gave up and left everything as a spread-out mess. I can't believe they've left it this long to address, it's an awful user experience.
The entire point of the "new" Settings app is to be dumbed down. To include all the settings from the control panel would go against the entire point of the Settings app.
If we're talking about the latest version of Windows 11, I would say it's dumbed down, but everything I personally need is still there.
This doesn't say they're removing it, just deprecating it. I thought it had been deprecated for ages
I can't imagine that they won't be removing it eventually though.
Why would they? They still have dialogues from Windows 95, if not before. Microsoft pretty much never removes anything, they just hide it and add new stuff on top because they're terrified of breaking backward compatibility.
That ODBC window has been there since about Win 3.1 I think. Watching those completely unresizeable forms pop up in the middle of my 1440p monitor is always amusing.
I can just see some guy coding that, thinking "why would it need to be bigger? It's practically the full screen!"
I'm not sure if regedit has changed much either, certainly seems like it's the same since using it in xp? Odbc windows are 100% 3.1 though.
Feel like task scheduler, event viewer and partitioning tools have been relatively static as well, but they're not as old as the odbc window. Tbh I'm not surprised that administrative/dev tools haven't had a ui change.
that's fading though. it's coming as they push towards the walled garden.
Sure, but they'll still be available because Windows Server customers use them, and it's easier to just leave it in for both than to remove it for the retail release. So they'll probably hide it more, but I'm guessing it'll still be accessible for power users.
That's okay because Windows will be gone entirely from my PC in a month.
Fine. Next desktop build is linux.
Windows 10 is RIP October 2025 anyway, so might as well.
Didn't they learn that taking away what people grew up with for more than two decades already will result in outraged customers? (Windows 8 - start menu removed and replaced by start screen)
Not if they improve it. But I doubt they will.
We improved it by making it always available! Just sign into your Windows365 account in Edge and...
Upload all your files to our one drive account instead of the drive that's physically in your computer and...
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.
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.
Perhaps this is the year of the Linux desktop?
Turns out the year of the Linux desktop will not be heralded by making Linux better, but by making Windows worse.
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.
I have two perfect logo ideas. One with a cute little penguin, the other with smirking gnu. Just spitballing here
E: corrected pitballing to spitballing, which my phone thought was the correct autocorrect...
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)?
New all, everybody!
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.
Yeah, that makes sense. If it's starting to bite them in the butt, though, maybe they should start relegating that stuff to emulation, if they can write a good enough emulator.
I don't know when. Maybe it's already gone by, maybe it's in the future. But there's probably a point in time when all of that backward compatibility stops being worth it.
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
Wine (wine is not (an) emulator) is a reimplementation of the windows api set. It's literally starting windows again from scratch.
Oh I see. Well if it has exactly the same API, if that API also has weird legacy stuff built in that hinder developers, then maybe not, but overall that does sound very similar, yes!
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.
Just kill all of windows already
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.
Well there’s already WinToys, which does a lot. It may be a new project for them to just add in a legacy Control Panel tab.
I hope they don't make that update to windows 10 as well 😭 control panel feels faster to use than windows settings
Half of windows settings is a button that says "additional settings" that opens up the full settings window that hasn't changed since Win95. It's absolutely insane that in a decade they haven't managed to even replicate full functionality.
What a fucking piece of shit company. What's the eta to fully learn Linux, and learn how to set up a dual boot os where Linus is daily driver but a local windows account is on its own drive for emergencies and gaming.
If you have a USB stick handy, you could probably be dual booting into Linux Mint within an hour.
No need to fully learn Linux before moving to that. You can do your research using Firefox on your Linux desktop. And by “research” I mean googling/DDGing things as you need to know how to do them. It starts to stick.
For windows users I actually recommend fedora kinoite, because it's immutable it's VERY difficult to break things and also you get the benefits of safer updates, and it's plenty easier to use.
I tried to get to the printer settings today on a users machine and it kept redirecting me to the settings menu… 😠
I can't wait for Microsoft to kill itself.
Unfortunately the best we can hope for is to detach from its shambling corpse until it exhausts its forward momentum over a decade or two and gets partitioned out at auction to some VC scavenger.
Welp time to go back to Linux...
Hate to break it to you but Linux doesn't have the Windows Control Panel either. :P
I'll just open the play store and download the addon.. that's how this computer stuff works.. right?
I am pure linux for personal use and mac for work but:
Good. One of the biggest problems Windows has had for the past decade or so is having like three different versions of every menu and needing to figure out which one let you do what you want. Consolidate that shit
They already had that shit consolidated. It's called "Control Panel" and has been around for forty years.
say it louder for the people in the back
it louder
Honest question as I only use Windows every once and a while. Can you get to that disk management thing from the Control Panel? The one that looks like gparted.
right click start, left click disk management
Yep, depending on the version it was under either administrative tools or system tools option in control panel. It's now also in the menu when you right click the start button.
And for twenty or so years they have added features that aren't in there. Hence the problem.
So unless you have a time machine, the answer is to consolidate.
Thank fuck I'm in the process of moving to Linux. I loathe the Settings app. Will be sad to not be able to say I know how to properly use Windows anymore, when I used to know it like the back of my hand. Not being able to give support to friends and family will feel really weird.
Not being able to give support to friends and family will feel really weird.
I see it as being liberated. Besides, while it'll suck to be unable to fix their problems, if it gets bad enough that they consider other operating systems, you'll be right there to help them switch!
I'm in the process of getting a family member over to Linux (again. didn't work that well last time), but still, I like to help friends and family with computers when I can and I've always taken pride in being the go-to guy who know how to fix the thing. Ah well.
ROFL, you naive sweet child. Once you're a computer expert, you'll always be so. Friends/family will still harass you and think your lying if you try use an excuse.
Waiting for the day the headline reads “Microsoft officially confirms its killing Windows.”
What is the benefit? The name? Call control panel "Settings" and be done with it.
You could phase it in. "Control Panel Settings", then "CP Settings", then just "Settings" and Bob's your mother's brother!
Eeeeeh maybe not "CP settings"...
Shoulda thought that out a bit more...
Yeah dude, Club Penguin Settings is a whole different app.
I use to keep all my windows MGMT tools on a custom MMC screen. So organized.
Can someone explain to me the difference from Control Panel to Settings? It seems like more of a name change and of course, the UI will be different, but won't it effectively be a hub to control your personal settings just like control panel?
Currently the Settings app in windows doesn't have the same level of features as the control panel does. It's definitely got most features that normal users will need, but if you're a power user or a system admin, you'll quickly find yourself having to swap over to control panel to configure anything past the very basics for quite a few different parts of windows. This change will be fine if Microsoft achieve feature parity between settings and control panel, so that there's no lost functionality when they get rid of control panel.
I think most people are a bit upset at the idea of the control panel disappearing because they don't trust that Microsoft will end up reaching that feature parity, leaving people with less options to control their own devices effectively.
I don't think feature parity is the only problem here. Power users need information density and quick reactivity, two things that the new settings – with their huge buttons and useless animations – dearly lack.
Linux users be like:
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.
Software is really hard. Replacing something that needs to continuously have new features added to it because it's not been replaced yet... You're running to stand still
TL;DR - It's being replaced renamed to "Settings"
But not really. The Settings menu has never been as useful as Control Panel and there's still a ton of functionality that can only be accessed from the Control Panel. This and many other moves by MS recently are why Windows 10 is the last version of Windows I'll be using. With the work Valve has done to support SteamDeck I can finally go 100% Linux.
TLDR, the settings app does not fully incorporate all the minutia of the control panel and power users are naturally going to be upset about the change assuming they stick around that long.
Too many specialized companies still make Windows-only software, e.g.
chip vendors.
100% true.
Why put up with their abuse?
Each one has different specialized components that aren't at full parity with their competitors, but that doesn't even matter since it's the case with literally all of them.
So... why are people upset about this? I'd say it's about damn time. Having two settings apps is pretty ridiculous and it's honestly crazy it's taken them this long to ditch the control panel. I still remember people making fun of Microsoft's inability to drop control panel in the Windows 10 era. Is there anything special about the control panel or uniquely terrible about the settings app that would warrant this kind of negative reaction? Is it because of the settings that aren't available in settings? If they're preparing to drop control panel that probably means they're going to add whatever settings are still stranded on it to the new settings app, unless there's evidence that they won't do that.
The problem is that the settings app has consistently been a dumbed down, feature-sparse version of what was in the control panel for the bits it has replaced. Tweaks that experienced users have relied on for decades are simply missing in the settings app, forcing them to go back to the control panel
If Microsoft actually re-implemented all the knobs and dials in control panel then I wouldn't be so irritated, but we've been shown for the last several years that they only bother migrating the most commonly used settings.
I bet within a decade they pivot to barely any settings at all, claiming the released experience is the only experience you'll ever need.
they’re going to add whatever settings are still stranded on it to the new settings app,
Oh, sweet summer child.
means they're going to add whatever settings are still stranded on it to the new settings app
Lol, nope
they can fucking try
I am curious where I’ll find the touch screen configuration utility when they do.
Because you touch y... wait no. That doesn't work here.
Let me channel my inner Microsoft and think of the most asinine...
OK, yeah, you'll have to touch and hold the right hand side of the screen for three seconds, then the left and the right for a further three, let go of the right and keep touching the left for three more, let go and then the settings will pop up. I call it "Son of sticky keys."
There will be no other way to get to those settings.
Flight simmers the world round will revolt if that dialog isn’t easy to get to or converted to modern format.
In favor of what? I still have to use control panel because some things are seemingly unreachable by the "settings" menus.
Yeah. This sounds a lot like some PM type thinks they're gonna get rid of control panel, and they just don't know what all is actually in there.
And not to mention the custom control panel applets hanging around out there from who-knows-what vendors.
I don't think that the PM is wrong. They absolutely can get rid of the control panel. It's the user who will suffer ✌
I wonder if there would be a way to "embed" those old panel applets into the new settings somehow.
I bet they at most remove control.exe or make it open the Settings app, but still allow launching old vendor .cpl items just like they already can be opened in Control Panel.
This is already implemented on a lot of the settings pages on 11.
Edit: just wanted to add I don't think well. I use it at work.
Windows is king at being inconsistent 🔥
If only they had trained advanced users to use the CLI that would never change unlike the GUI
AMD FirePro and Catalyst users are going to probably stay on an older version of the OS, considering most of those users are going to be educational institutions, engineering workshops, makerspaces/hackerspaces etc.
Can't think of any other vendor products that integrated quite as much into the legacy control panel area
I'm thinking of highly niche industrial and embedded products who are likely to be left behind.
A major traditional selling point for Windows has always been the backwards compatibility.
That's M$ intention, to hide some settings from users and lose control of Windows.
Right, I forgot, MS doesn't want you to have control what programs are doing or how your computer works. Corporate way or....linux.
I may be technologically challenged but Microsoft has been steadily selling me on linux ever since windows 10.
Linux is just straight up easier to use than an unfucked windows.
See, that may be the case. Or it might not be. It's a risk vz reward right now. I am not good with computers and have had my PC, laptop, phone and smart watch, inexplicably break, get stuck on boot and had to have them repaired. I just know my mistakes are easier to screw up my computer and data on linux. So the worse MS gets, the more I am willing to risk it.
It’s probably all in the registry somewhere.
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.
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.
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.
Got reminded yesterday when trying to find a way to clear and apps cached information.
Windows was a simple path, but osx needed 5 steps to find where osx decided to put it.
I'm pretty positive on mac OS, as an OS it's technically quite good, but their preferences app has always been atrocious almost entirely for this reason, I want to have two preferences windows open to different pages please..
I hear you. I have always been a power user so I was pretty shocked when you could not open two file managers at once in OSX.
The thing about Apple devices is they work great, as long as you do it they way they want.
You can have multiple finder windows in OSX, thats perfectly normal, but you cant have the network settings open next to the printer settings.
Well that was not the case with the last time I used OSX. You click on finder and it would not open a second window. This is not how Windows or Gnome/Kwin work.
you have been able to right click (or i guess two finger click for apple people) and open a second window forever.
Yeah, like I was saying. You have to do it the way they want rather than just click on it like every other GUI.
One thing I really did like was the use of the drop down menu. I really appreciate all programs using the same basic interface.
I absolutely hated all the Microsoft Ribbon bar nonsense. They have reinvented it so many times you never know where to find anything.
As admin and tech support, I use the control panel constantly. I use the settings app... for display configuration, I guess?
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.
Yeah the new interface has restrictions it doesn’t tell you about until you try to apply new settings.
You can now reach the network connections folder, using an option on the network status page. It's something like advanced network options. Still all the classic stuff, but avoids "control panel." I'm going to guess links like that are not going to be removed.
If they just outright remove all of that, you really will need to learn how to do everything in powershell.
The goal is to move you to powershell
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.
Thus why im moving to 11. Lots of the PCs I work with are still 10 though.
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.
Windows: Only when paid to touch it.
The first thing I did after getting my work laptop was to install Linux. I am so glad that my work allows it.
I too am limited by the technology of our time
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 have friends who work in IT and would probably slam their head against the wall if they had to deal with Control Panel being removed.
Are Microsoft deliberately trying to make the fabled Year of the Linux Desktop finally become a reality? Because I feel like we're two or three more dumbfuck business moves away from this...
I have a PC at home that works perfectly fine. Browses the internet, emulates GameCube and Dreamcast, runs any app I need.
It's not eligible for Windows 11. In about a month MS will just stop supporting my PC, and it will not have the option to be a Windows PC despite still having plenty of service time to offer.
Microsoft is basically forcing that PC to run Linux instead.
Windows 10 is being supported until next October, you've got more than a month. That said, I've been on Linux for just over a month and I'm so much happier with it. I really like KDE Plasma as a desktop environment. I made the leap because I was unhappy with Windows, but at this point I genuinely prefer Linux.
Ah. Thank you!! I was planning to disconnect the computer from wifi next month until I got around to setting up Linux. Nice to know there is more time.
I used Mint like 15 years ago trying to set up retropie on a cheap netbook. It felt really smooth, but I couldn't get something to work and just never had time to research a resolution.
I'm sure it's more user friendly now or at least the tools are more successful on first install. Going to find out sooner or later. I really just use that old PC to store pictures and play retro games, so it shouldn't be hard to convert with a little time for research.
If you're coming from Windows I recommend Fedora KDE Spin. If has a similar look and feel and is very up to date while remaining stable.
Thank you for the recommendation!
KDE really is nice. It can be a little bit buggy when messing with themes and panels and stuff but overall its nice. I've got it looking like waybar and I'm really enjoying it.
Which distro are you on? Plasma has reached it's 6.0 version I think now. I used it back in the day and KDE apps are really more powerful than their GNOME counterparts.
Don't sweat "what distro" so much. All the major distros offer the same desk tops. So pick a distro you like and just download the KDE Plasma spin of it and enjoy.
Bazzite, it's based on immutable Fedora. But it made sense for my use case because it's one of the more consistent at working out of the box with Nvidia graphics cards and I wanted the gaming stuff, but Plasma should be more or less the same everywhere. I'm not sure which version of Plasma it's running but Bazzite is generally pretty up to date with everything but I can't check right now.
Can confirm, want to change your domain or computer name? Windows 7/10: control panel , system , computer name tab. Windows 10 /11: control panel, system, windows settings, advanced system settings, old system control panel, computer name tab.
Why add a middle man??
That many steps? WindowsKey+Break > Change computer name.
If you're okay with three steps, on Windows 10 and newer, you can right click the start menu and generally open system. Just about any version supports right clicking "My Computer" or "This PC" and selecting properties, as well.
win+X, then the letter for system. probably s or y but not sure. i use win+x, a all the time for an admin ps window
I use powershell for this. I was just stating the click through steps.
But that would require effort to learn to do something different. And a lot of users are firmly against that notion.
Just like the new shitty right click menu. There is no reason to reinvent the wheel just because.
And there is no reason not to either. You would still be looking at the cli in Unix with that attitude.
I don't know about that one, It would be really hard to teleconference though the terminal.
Especially considering we still have (more or less) the same CLI for decades at this point.
Bourne was from 1977-1979, bash which was heavily inspired/designed to replace was from 1989. It is still the default shell in ubuntu.
Open Start or hit Win+R- type sysdm.cpl. Done. They kill off the easy to click icon in Control Panel, but they leave the stuff in still. I doubt they'll remove them. Or at least hope not, lol. Settings is such a cluster to go through.
Next time I write my ver 5 of my admin program I'll add that in!
I already do that enough as it is with Windows 11...
I've been using linux for about a decade. I only know how to maintain my system and google when troubles arise. I'm pretty comfortable with my setup and would love to see many make that jump as well. However, I have to concede that corporate environments add a whole another dimension to the problem.
Control panel largely accrued content - it is generally navigated via left and right click which works great and is stable. Things don't vanish.
Settings, on the other hand, is left click only navigation mostly. It also changed constantly (usually for the worst) - tutorials written 2 years ago are no longer valid because access to that setting was removed. This makes using settings to fix things a real nightmare.
But luckily each item has a lot of "maybe you were looking for X or Y" at the bottom since you can't find anything in there. So just click anywhere, and scroll to the bottom and you'll find what you want in 2 or 3 screens.
Unless it's been removed. Then you just ask the resident IA.
Windows is so easy!
I run SuSE btw.
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...
Great, now I'll have to
GoogleBing for a four-line command when before I could just dig through a few menus.I mean, if there's still gonna be command line commands for all the features then there's no reason why a 3rd party couldn't make a gui app for them and recreate the control panels app
they should call it, get this, control panel
For the investor's sake, I think it should be called the HyperPanel
Good point ... unless MS manages to cripple that capability somehow.
That's a hot take for Lemmy.
Nah, PowerShell is just a shitty bash wannabe
Actually PowerShelll is basically a wrapper for .NET classes... and it doesn't really emulate Bash in any functional way.
The little time I have spent on powershell, I found it to be very slow. The input is also very verbose. I'm sure someone will say it allows one to be specific but I can be equally specific in bash as well. It's like the Java Enterprise of scripting language.
It is verbose. It's intended to be readable by untrained people, with a consistent verb-subject format for commands (e.g. Get-ChildItem, Set-Variable), though it turns out that concept doesn't scale very well and the format gets increasingly broken when you get into the Azure PowerShell commands (New-AzLoadBalancerInboundNatRuleConfig).
The real power of PowerShell is that it can interact with .NET directly (because it is .NET), which allows you to quickly and easily build scripts for anything that uses .NET (like Windows). For instance, you can view or edit registry keys of other systems through a PowerShell remote session (using the .NET RegistryKey class), and set up a loop to edit a registry key across a list of machines remotely (I used to do this while managing on-prem AD groups in my last job, it's much faster and easier than trying to change registry keys through remote desktop sessions, more reliable because it's programmatic, and you can easily log the command output and catch any systems that failed to accept the change).
PowerShell might not be what Bash is for the average Linux user, but it's a massive improvement for managing Windows systems at scale. Anyone who works in corporate IT should learn PowerShell.
It's like a built-in Ansible equivalent (the configuring and management part at least). I'll agree that's neat. If I managed a fleet of Windows machine, I would properly learn that.
But I don't think it's something for the average home user. And the Linux way of configuring remote machines is too easy.
Ah, so it sucks even harder
Powershell has a completely different approach of working with commands than traditional Unix shells. You pretty much don't know what you are talking about.
Look, if it's not a file, I don't want to have anything to do with it.
That's fine, I also pretty much prefer standard Unix tools, due to how efficient they are, but you can't just say made up stuff with no valid explanation, because Powershell has still nothing to do with bash.
Powershell at first seems to be weird and clunky, but after you get used to its syntax you can quickly look up and use its commands without much guessing.
Finally linux will have parity in useability with windows.
No, it's already more usable. You're not bound to a GUI or hidden, indiscoverable incantations.
I felt the /s was implied but clearly enough people actually believe that linux is only for people who master arcane command lines that it could be taken as a genuine belief.
There are PowerShell fanboys here. Anything is possible.
...and after a decade accuse Linux community for copying their great innovations.
Well then it's guess which is the one to use now or which os those commands are naively installed and which need to be installed
No. Don't worry, they moved the controls to the edge browser! Isn't that great 😃? 👍👍👍.
This will bring so many people to Linux and will force so many others to start their own OSes.
Unfortunately, most Windows users are not tech savy and will never move to Linux, regardless of how user-friendly Linux becomes. It would take large-scale retailers switching their computers to have Linux pre-installed instead of Windows before any meaningful transition happens.
Not tech savy person here who's interested in switching to Linux but afraid of fucking it up and the one guy I knew in real life who used Linux and would've helped me out died during covid so I'm on my own.
My old computer won't support windows 11 and I'm not in a position to upgrade my hardware. I've been poking around trying learn about linux but I'm more of a hands on learner so basically I'm going to have to learn as I go which is quite scary for someone who's never even seen a computer running it.
Got an extra USB stick and an old laptop kicking around you're okay with wiping? Ideally 4GB RAM but 2GB would be okay. Start with Linux Mint and follow their installation guide - verifying the ISO image in Windows is probably the toughest part.
Or make absolutely certain you're on the official Mint website, torrent it and don't bother checking, I'm not your mother. "Who the f**k checks those anyway?" (Mint hasn't been hacked since, but it's part of why they're pushing verifying, they know that their users have been targeted before. Also if something goes wrong with the download the install will fail and you'll waste more time than if you just checked.)
If you don't have a spare computer, a live USB can let you try Linux without making changes to your computer, but it's going to be slow - a proper install is going to be a much nicer experience. If you're okay without persistence (ie you can't change anything or install additional programs for the next time you boot into it), just follow the Linux Mint website's installation guide and stop before the actual install step. For persistence, try this method instead, but you really don't want to use it long term, USB sticks aren't designed for this.
Once you've tried it live and you think you like the desktop environment, but if you're not sure you're ready to fully commit, if your computer has an extra slot for an SSD you could buy a second one and dual boot, that's what I did. (Dual booting on the same drive is doable but more of a headache, and even on a different drive Windows doesn't always play nicely.)
Thank you much for this! I really appreciate that you took the time write all of that out
I do have an old laptop I can use for learning on, don't know why it didn't occur to me to try linux on that first, but I'll definitely do that, follow your instructions and see how it goes.
I genuinely want to switch, just didn't have the confidence to actually try. Thank you again for the great advice! I gotta go dig out that old laptop.
If you aren't ready to fully commit to installing it on a hard drive, you could probably make a live USB stick of Linux. There are installers built to run on windows that will install Linux onto a USB drive, which you can boot from after turning off your PC. That way, you don't need to worry about wiping or resetting an old computer just to see if you like it.
Thank you for the info! Thats a great way to get an introduction to linux so can I poke around and get used to it. Appreciate the advice!
Ask ChatGPT. 3.5 should know it. I know I could install FreeBSD because of it.
I've finally made one tiny step into the Linux pool: Replacing my little old Plex server & NAS (mini PC, Windows 10) with... an even tinier Raspberry Pi 5.
It's been nice to finally have an excuse to start learning Linux: commands, bash scripts, ssh, samba shares, etc. I've always admired lean, portable FOSS, so it's way overdue.
I honestly wouldn't mind the new interface if it at least has all the options and functionality from the control panel, but it doesn't - there's so much functionality you can only access via control panel
And this is my gripe.
They can just make an AI called "Control" that will handle all the settings for everyone.
And I’ll keep visiting Control Panel in hospice. Bite me Microsoft.
WTF why did I misread your comment as "Chris Parnell"
Probably because we were just watching Archer bro
No, I'm watching Cars 3
yessssssssssssssssss
It'd be fine if 1) everything from Control Panel is implemented and properly working and 2) everything stays consistent (because otherwise, as other folks have mentioned, at one point written tutorials even with screenshots quickly become obsolete). I don't see this happening any time soon.
Maybe instead of that they can start encouraging people to use the command line, although even fewer settings are reachable though there.
Their settings pages are the worst; full of white space, finding what they considered "advanced" settings is usually a pain in the ass, and everything is dumbed down to a mind-numbing extent.
I've hated Settings pages with a passion since they were introduced, and always typed the full .msc I was looking for.
I really hate that you can only open one settings page at a time. There is no justification to making you lose your place you’re working on just because you want to adjust another minor setting. With the old interface I can e.g. have network and sound settings open at the same time and I don’t know why they took that away.
I have been able to live with everything else, but this is the one that kills me every time.
the loss of info density in favor of making everything fingerable has been one of the worst things to happen to anyone slightly inclined at managing systems. i hate trying to manage things in a touch based UI. so much fucking scrolling and wasted space. it does look nice , but fuck is it a productivity killer.
I also dislike the design layout. Eg. I much prefer the control panel version of Disk Management than the settings purely from an aesthetics stand point. Each disk and their partitions are just easier to see and differentiate from others.
LOL, there's no more common phobia among Windows users than the CLI. EVERY Linux discussion "BUT ZOMG CLI COMMANDS!" (when realistically a novice user can avoid them most of the time, and they absolutely are more efficient for helping someone via lemmy post or similar than figuring out what version of what DE they have and trying to tell them the 12 clicks they need to do for the same task)
No joke. Opening a command line from windows by itself is considered hacking by many. Even toggling dark mode in websites triggers that fear.
"OMG. Are you a hacker?"
"...I'm just using Powershell."
between the powershell push, wsl, and sudo for windows they are pushing command line usage for advanced users though
I can't argue with that, but I still take exception to the idea that only advanced users should be willing/able/unafraid to use the CLI. (not that I'm suggesting that you personally are pushing that viewpoint)
When you click a button, you have to read and interpret the label on that button, then hope the person who programmed it actually did program it to do what it is labeled to suggest, and sometimes even well meaning devs make this ambiguous. Plus, you have to FIND the button, which is kinda the subject of many of the discussions here in this very thread.
You go learn what ls does one time, and now you know how to list the contents of a directory. Spend two minutes each learning ps aux and grep, and now you know how to find process info for firefox (or whatever), plus you don't need to know more than the very most basic things about grep to use it to search a text or conf file for a particular string. Or learn the ffmpeg command that you use most often for recursively processing a directory full of video files, and now you don't spend 20 minutes mucking around with handbrake or whatever when prepping files to toss onto your Kodi box (I'm just pulling that one out of my butt). Hell, yt-dlp for downloading videos from just about anywhere is better than any gui tool I ever used.
I think it's totally valid for people to prefer a gui, but I find it a little foolish that so many people just seem to intentionally shut off their brain when presented with a CLI - it's different than clicking buttons, and it's not always superior, but it should absolutely not be the bogeyman that many treat it as. You can probably learn less than ten commands to just a minimal level of proficiency and get a LOT done.
I guarantee you they've only ported over about half of the Control Panel's features. The common stuff, sure. The rest...
Talking about consistency, technically Windows still has UI elements from 3.1 era at Atleast couple of obscure places.
Gotta brush up on the ol' powershell
Windows "god mode": https://www.howtogeek.com/402458/enable-god-mode-in-windows-10/
What is god mode?
It's very easy to set this up, and it also works in Windows 11. Even if Microsoft removes access to the normal Control Panel, I seriously doubt this will be taken out.
I used to love HowToGeek, but I sadly see that now that's also enshittified (not the article you linked, but the most recent ones).
Worse, if you go to their articles via their newsletter, it redirects to aws.me domain in the middle which uBlock Origin blocks. You need to manually allow that subdomain to let it run. Plus, they now and then nudge you to create a free account to read more articles.
Oh, did I mention there is a Premium tier of their site as well? Ironical that as the site's editorial quality is coming down, the shittiness is increasing. I think originally one guy used to run it and write articles there. It was relatively frugal (compared to the churn of articles that they process today) and higher quality.
Yes, I remember the guy writing there. That was a serious website! But maybe he sold it to somebody else before Google completely killed their search engine.
Now, if you want to rank well on Google, you either have to churn out stupid articles filled with SEO junk every single day.
I know this but they can break it as well if they do remove it not only hide it ( class ids ). For me it's plain as the new windows settings are dead slow and it won't be usable if your computer is under very heavy load. Only cmd, maybe powershell and maybe sys internals will be what's left for you
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:
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.
So in six months, someone will have written a third-party Windows Control Panel.
Nah it'll just be shoved into PowerToys.
Which is becoming a must have on windows.
Honestly wouldn't even be that difficult to build. Windows is just a GUI for Powershell anyway.
So how many different locations am I going to have to click through to get the settings done now??
Well, one less, because the place where they all are won't be there anymore.
Angry up vote.
Each setting you will have to type into the windows search that is progressively getting worse.
If they actually move all the settings over to the "new" settings app (it's actually 12 years old now): good.
It's an absolute joke that there are multiple settings apps in windows, with design inconsistency across them, and it being a crapshoot whether the screen you look at will support dark mode or not (can you tell I'm tired of being blinded on evenings by unexpected white windows? Lol).
If they don't move all the settings over: bad.
Yeah they're usually niche, but some of those options are needed!
Since this is Microsoft we're talking about, it's probably going to be the latter, unfortunately. "Oh you want to adjust some network settings? That's not in our settings app, and we've retired the control panel – you actually need to open Run and type ncpa.cpl"
It truly made no sense to me when they started the process of migrating stuff from control panel to the "new" Metro-style Settings, then just kind of... gave up and left everything as a spread-out mess. I can't believe they've left it this long to address, it's an awful user experience.
The entire point of the "new" Settings app is to be dumbed down. To include all the settings from the control panel would go against the entire point of the Settings app.
If we're talking about the latest version of Windows 11, I would say it's dumbed down, but everything I personally need is still there.
This doesn't say they're removing it, just deprecating it. I thought it had been deprecated for ages
I can't imagine that they won't be removing it eventually though.
Why would they? They still have dialogues from Windows 95, if not before. Microsoft pretty much never removes anything, they just hide it and add new stuff on top because they're terrified of breaking backward compatibility.
That ODBC window has been there since about Win 3.1 I think. Watching those completely unresizeable forms pop up in the middle of my 1440p monitor is always amusing.
I can just see some guy coding that, thinking "why would it need to be bigger? It's practically the full screen!"
I'm not sure if regedit has changed much either, certainly seems like it's the same since using it in xp? Odbc windows are 100% 3.1 though.
Feel like task scheduler, event viewer and partitioning tools have been relatively static as well, but they're not as old as the odbc window. Tbh I'm not surprised that administrative/dev tools haven't had a ui change.
that's fading though. it's coming as they push towards the walled garden.
Sure, but they'll still be available because Windows Server customers use them, and it's easier to just leave it in for both than to remove it for the retail release. So they'll probably hide it more, but I'm guessing it'll still be accessible for power users.
That's okay because Windows will be gone entirely from my PC in a month.
Fine. Next desktop build is linux.
Windows 10 is RIP October 2025 anyway, so might as well.
Didn't they learn that taking away what people grew up with for more than two decades already will result in outraged customers? (Windows 8 - start menu removed and replaced by start screen)
Not if they improve it. But I doubt they will.
We improved it by making it always available! Just sign into your Windows365 account in Edge and...
Upload all your files to our one drive account instead of the drive that's physically in your computer and...
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.
I'm so sorry my dude, no one deserves that kind of suffering.
If I hadn't already migrated to Linux after the insider crapshow, this probably would have forced me off.
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.
Perhaps this is the year of the Linux desktop?
Turns out the year of the Linux desktop will not be heralded by making Linux better, but by making Windows worse.
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?
I have two perfect logo ideas. One with a cute little penguin, the other with smirking gnu. Just spitballing here
E: corrected pitballing to spitballing, which my phone thought was the correct autocorrect...
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)?
New all, everybody!
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.
Yeah, that makes sense. If it's starting to bite them in the butt, though, maybe they should start relegating that stuff to emulation, if they can write a good enough emulator.
I don't know when. Maybe it's already gone by, maybe it's in the future. But there's probably a point in time when all of that backward compatibility stops being worth it.
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
Wine (wine is not (an) emulator) is a reimplementation of the windows api set. It's literally starting windows again from scratch.
Oh I see. Well if it has exactly the same API, if that API also has weird legacy stuff built in that hinder developers, then maybe not, but overall that does sound very similar, yes!
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.
Just kill all of windows already
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.
Well there’s already WinToys, which does a lot. It may be a new project for them to just add in a legacy Control Panel tab.
I hope they don't make that update to windows 10 as well 😭 control panel feels faster to use than windows settings
Half of windows settings is a button that says "additional settings" that opens up the full settings window that hasn't changed since Win95. It's absolutely insane that in a decade they haven't managed to even replicate full functionality.
What a fucking piece of shit company. What's the eta to fully learn Linux, and learn how to set up a dual boot os where Linus is daily driver but a local windows account is on its own drive for emergencies and gaming.
If you have a USB stick handy, you could probably be dual booting into Linux Mint within an hour.
No need to fully learn Linux before moving to that. You can do your research using Firefox on your Linux desktop. And by “research” I mean googling/DDGing things as you need to know how to do them. It starts to stick.
For windows users I actually recommend fedora kinoite, because it's immutable it's VERY difficult to break things and also you get the benefits of safer updates, and it's plenty easier to use.
I tried to get to the printer settings today on a users machine and it kept redirecting me to the settings menu… 😠
I can't wait for Microsoft to kill itself.
Unfortunately the best we can hope for is to detach from its shambling corpse until it exhausts its forward momentum over a decade or two and gets partitioned out at auction to some VC scavenger.
Welp time to go back to Linux...
Hate to break it to you but Linux doesn't have the Windows Control Panel either. :P
I'll just open the play store and download the addon.. that's how this computer stuff works.. right?
I am pure linux for personal use and mac for work but:
Good. One of the biggest problems Windows has had for the past decade or so is having like three different versions of every menu and needing to figure out which one let you do what you want. Consolidate that shit
They already had that shit consolidated. It's called "Control Panel" and has been around for forty years.
say it louder for the people in the back
it louder
Honest question as I only use Windows every once and a while. Can you get to that disk management thing from the Control Panel? The one that looks like gparted.
right click start, left click disk management
Yep, depending on the version it was under either administrative tools or system tools option in control panel. It's now also in the menu when you right click the start button.
And for twenty or so years they have added features that aren't in there. Hence the problem.
So unless you have a time machine, the answer is to consolidate.
Thank fuck I'm in the process of moving to Linux. I loathe the Settings app. Will be sad to not be able to say I know how to properly use Windows anymore, when I used to know it like the back of my hand. Not being able to give support to friends and family will feel really weird.
I see it as being liberated. Besides, while it'll suck to be unable to fix their problems, if it gets bad enough that they consider other operating systems, you'll be right there to help them switch!
I'm in the process of getting a family member over to Linux (again. didn't work that well last time), but still, I like to help friends and family with computers when I can and I've always taken pride in being the go-to guy who know how to fix the thing. Ah well.
ROFL, you naive sweet child. Once you're a computer expert, you'll always be so. Friends/family will still harass you and think your lying if you try use an excuse.
Waiting for the day the headline reads “Microsoft officially confirms its killing Windows.”
It was October 20th 2014.
What is the benefit? The name? Call control panel "Settings" and be done with it.
You could phase it in. "Control Panel Settings", then "CP Settings", then just "Settings" and Bob's your mother's brother!
Eeeeeh maybe not "CP settings"...
Shoulda thought that out a bit more...
Yeah dude, Club Penguin Settings is a whole different app.
I use to keep all my windows MGMT tools on a custom MMC screen. So organized.
Can someone explain to me the difference from Control Panel to Settings? It seems like more of a name change and of course, the UI will be different, but won't it effectively be a hub to control your personal settings just like control panel?
Currently the Settings app in windows doesn't have the same level of features as the control panel does. It's definitely got most features that normal users will need, but if you're a power user or a system admin, you'll quickly find yourself having to swap over to control panel to configure anything past the very basics for quite a few different parts of windows. This change will be fine if Microsoft achieve feature parity between settings and control panel, so that there's no lost functionality when they get rid of control panel.
I think most people are a bit upset at the idea of the control panel disappearing because they don't trust that Microsoft will end up reaching that feature parity, leaving people with less options to control their own devices effectively.
I don't think feature parity is the only problem here. Power users need information density and quick reactivity, two things that the new settings – with their huge buttons and useless animations – dearly lack.
Linux users be like:
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.
Software is really hard. Replacing something that needs to continuously have new features added to it because it's not been replaced yet... You're running to stand still
TL;DR - It's being
replacedrenamed to "Settings"But not really. The Settings menu has never been as useful as Control Panel and there's still a ton of functionality that can only be accessed from the Control Panel. This and many other moves by MS recently are why Windows 10 is the last version of Windows I'll be using. With the work Valve has done to support SteamDeck I can finally go 100% Linux.
TLDR, the settings app does not fully incorporate all the minutia of the control panel and power users are naturally going to be upset about the change assuming they stick around that long.
Too many specialized companies still make Windows-only software, e.g. chip vendors.
100% true.
Why put up with their abuse?
Each one has different specialized components that aren't at full parity with their competitors, but that doesn't even matter since it's the case with literally all of them.
So... why are people upset about this? I'd say it's about damn time. Having two settings apps is pretty ridiculous and it's honestly crazy it's taken them this long to ditch the control panel. I still remember people making fun of Microsoft's inability to drop control panel in the Windows 10 era. Is there anything special about the control panel or uniquely terrible about the settings app that would warrant this kind of negative reaction? Is it because of the settings that aren't available in settings? If they're preparing to drop control panel that probably means they're going to add whatever settings are still stranded on it to the new settings app, unless there's evidence that they won't do that.
The problem is that the settings app has consistently been a dumbed down, feature-sparse version of what was in the control panel for the bits it has replaced. Tweaks that experienced users have relied on for decades are simply missing in the settings app, forcing them to go back to the control panel
If Microsoft actually re-implemented all the knobs and dials in control panel then I wouldn't be so irritated, but we've been shown for the last several years that they only bother migrating the most commonly used settings.
I bet within a decade they pivot to barely any settings at all, claiming the released experience is the only experience you'll ever need.
Oh, sweet summer child.
Lol, nope
they can fucking try
I am curious where I’ll find the touch screen configuration utility when they do.
Because you touch y... wait no. That doesn't work here.
Let me channel my inner Microsoft and think of the most asinine...
OK, yeah, you'll have to touch and hold the right hand side of the screen for three seconds, then the left and the right for a further three, let go of the right and keep touching the left for three more, let go and then the settings will pop up. I call it "Son of sticky keys."
There will be no other way to get to those settings.
Flight simmers the world round will revolt if that dialog isn’t easy to get to or converted to modern format.