Everything I need is still in in the old settings windows that haven't changed in 23 years

You go deep enough and very Windows 95 looking menus pop up. Like are they building over the old system? It's all very strange.

It's actually insane how difficult it can be to find settings in windows. Especially when the indexing breaks for the 1000th time and you can't just search for it in the start menu.

I'll have you know windows has changed.

Now you can't move the task bar

Seriously, the speed in which windows is getting worse since after win 7 is almost comical.

Remember when they planned to move over all the Control Panel settings to the Settings app?

In Windows 10?

Only 23 years?

I don't think this bad lad has changed since Windows 3.1

I am really going to miss the old settings when they finally remove what is left of Control Panel. So far they have removed things or moved shit to force the Settings app. But they keep failing to make the new things have anywhere near the level of control. The power settings from Control Panel still matter way more than Settings and seem to actually stick when applied. And I just really have no idea how they have made stuff like resetting networking/connection issues worse over time. Fucking right-clicking on the networking icon on the taskbar and picking "repair" would actually get shit working again 8 times out of 10. But just seems to be a placebo at this point. There are still so many times that using different resets in Internet Options fixes more stuff I see regularly than the resets in Settings->Networking.

And the newer Troubleshooting options never fix any of the Windows Update issues I come across. Just a glorified verification of the failures I already know are happening. I never thought I would so badly miss being able to tell Windows Update to ignore updates if they were bugging out (not to avoid them all together but at least stop the OS from just constantly going through the motions of installing and failing during each reboot/shutdown). So many of the updates that used to give me issues were really either down to them trying to install out of order or due to a fuck-up on MS's end that pushed bad updates.

The push to so deeply embed these AI models into everything so fast is really pissing me off. Shit is known to have issues with just outright making shit up. Which is IMO reason enough to not be adding them to end-products (especially since the end-products are also still not finished with removing old versions of things). One thing that really worries me in my job with fixing people's PCs is the AI and search that pushes web content (and the now inescapable placement of ads) above local resources/programs/settings/etc. The main issues people have aren't actual viruses like in the past. It is the massive levels of scams and fake alerts followed by fake "repair techs." If the average person is so easy to trick when it is people scamming them. AI is going to blow shit up waaaaaaaay worse and will be able to do it so much faster and completely. Average people are still under the impression that these AI chats are giving completely real and accurate information (reminds me of how people used to believe that if something was said on TV that it was real).

Shit is fucked and going to get much worse at a dramatically faster rate due to rushing things in order to make as much money as fast as possible. Even Microsoft used to ship things in a more complete state. But gaming has made shipping broken products completely normal. So no reason to care about keeping any level of quality.

It's like Windows is devolving into really, REALLY early Linux, where a single Control Panel application is broken up into a half dozen separate parts and scattered throughout the interface in a dozen separate sub-sub-sub menus.

You should NOT have to hunt for the "print" button in a freaking word processor.

I wanted to open "devices and printers" and it opened some bullshit in the settings app and it didn't tell me the model of PC I have, then I clicked on "more information" or something like that and it opened the old "devices and printers" like I wanted in the first place.

Not all new things are good, Microsoft. Don't fix what isn't broken. I know new features make the shareholders jizz in their pants, but I want my system to continue working the way I need it to work. I've had to go out and get quite a few third party apps just to get around all the bullshit you keep changing for no reason.

Like why is it so hard for them? The underlying settings database doesn't have to change, only the UI. Unless it's all so messed up nobody dares touch it.

Because Microsoft went full Apple and adopted the "we know what's good for you so don't defy our decisions" philosophy of UX design.

Install Linux, be done with the Microsoft windows shit.

Meanwhile the KDE settings panel has been designed and redesigned like 20 times in the past 20 years. Much better, but also... Dude, please focus more on stability and less on "let's redo this from scratch again!"

I assumed they would try for feature parity at some point, but I think they forgot.

21st century Windows developer: "Hey! You know what people REALLY want in a text-based Office Suite? VERY very light gray text on a white background!"

Dude I got fucking livid yesterday because Alt keyboard shortcuts no longer work in Paint.

You have to interact with the ribbon before the alt key works.

And then there’s no key shortcut for “Save As” or “Exit”.

The fuck Microsoft. They weren’t hurting anyone and you’re wrecking 30 years of muscle memory. You know how frustrating that is?

According to Dave Plummer, a retired Windows Engineer, there are actually bugs in some of the windows components because he intended for them to be temporary solutions, like the CPU or Hard Drive usage numbers had to be Massaged to be lower than 100%, for example. When the Task Manager doesn't respond you can actually use Ctrl+Shift+Esc to queue up a new Task Manager if the old one doesn't revive itself. That stuff hasn't changed since 1996.

He also wrote the File Formatter, which has a file size limit of 32Gb for the Fat32 format for the same reason: it wasn't supposed to be permanent, but it hasn't changed for over 20 years. The concept at the time was that Cluster Slack would make a large drives like a terabyte more than 99% wasted space in the format, so 32Gb was arbitrarily chosen as a limit.

The guy who made it has a YouTube channel called Dave's Garage

im planning to switch from windows 11 to linux mint in 2026

windows 7-style control panel is one of the most non intuitive uis ever created

For the past 8 years I have had to disable 'mouse acceleration' after every Windows update. The updates have become more frequent, and the setting to disable acceleration has slowly become buried deeper in the menus. Switched to Linux two days ago and I'm never looking back.

The new windows appification and UI shit screams "we think people are straight up fuckin retarded" to me. They might as well manufacture keyboards to look like speak and spell toys

Really annoying start search that doesn't go to the control panel programs but opens bing search instead, also the right control panel features are not linked from the new 2024 system app ui WTF

I wish home and pro version influenced the setting panes. I get what they're trying to do with making it look like OSX and Linux and why the "network interface and adapters" probably isn't helpful for many home users, but I just wanna manage my interfaces here.

bro I'm so happy that the last windows i set up was 2015... i remember every time the excruciating 1h set aside to click and confirm and authenticate privileged access and pull slider etc... no sensible way to just run it in terminal, at least not that i know of. and nowadays there's this useless right-click menu that hides the real right-click menu and you can only fix this by finding a registry key 😂😂😂

Appwiz.cpl, ncpa.cpl, desk.cpl and mmsys.cpl. I use all the time.. ever since win 8 changed all the settings ui. That new ui, while getting better since 8 still sucks since the old control panel. I hope they never remove it since windows is still the name of the game for end users (even in some software dev environments).

Here's a list of cpl, you just use them at run or even the windows search. https://www.itechtics.com/control-panel-applets-cpl/

As I’ve heard this explained, enterprise admins have scripts, and to a less important extent muscle memory, tied to Control Panel layout and command lines, and that’s not a group you want to irritate.

I thought this was intentional? They have control panel stuff somewhat similar to the old style, but build a settings app for the less technical people so they can find common stuff without getting overwhelmed?

Hey, at least Windows has really good backwards compatibility.

Everything I need is configurable through PowerShell for years. Why bother with UI? Win 7, 10 or 11 - it's all the same.

*unwilling

I've got fed up of them changing how many hoops you go through to get to the old settings so I have the .cpl commands memorized that work no matter what computer you're at

Appwiz.cpl ncpa.cpl for common examples

So fucking annoyed at the taskbar overflow shit in Windows now. I don't want it hiding any of my system tray icons...I want to see what's running and I don't care how it looks. Every time certain apps update themselves, I have to go in again and select that particular app to hide itself with no way to tell Windows to just stop trying to hide system tray icons altogether. I've told it to hide Discord and the Xbox app probably 20 times each now and it conveniently forgets my decision every app update.