After mulling over it for close to 14 years, it seems Microsoft is finally ready to kill off the Windows Control Panel soon. An official confirmation has been posted on its website.
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.
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.
There are still things that don’t work in the new UI. A common example for me is changing the output of speakers on my htpc. Sometimes after an update it reverts to 2.0. Need to launch the old sound control panel to set it back to 7.1.
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.
I guarantee you they’ve only ported over about half of the Control Panel’s features. The common stuff, sure. The rest…
Gotta brush up on the ol’ powershell
Talking about consistency, technically Windows still has UI elements from 3.1 era at Atleast couple of obscure places.
the control panel they’re taking away is largely just antiquated and not used anymore in favour of settings app anyway
There are still things that don’t work in the new UI. A common example for me is changing the output of speakers on my htpc. Sometimes after an update it reverts to 2.0. Need to launch the old sound control panel to set it back to 7.1.
Or some network settings are not in the new “sinple” ui.
Or advanced power plan.
The only positive setting I can think of for the new settings ui is proxy settings finally being moved out of IE.
except any advanced user relies in that instead of the garbage settings menu
Users complain about changes being made and then they complain that change doesn’t happen enough.