Remember the old Windows Control Panel? It’s still there, in your up-to-date Windows 11 installation, as a number of settings still cannot be changed in the “new” Settings application. In the latest Insider Preview for Windows 11 in the Dev Channel, Microsoft moved another long list of settings from the Control Panel to Settings.
The focus is very much on time and language this time around. A whole slew of more niche features related to the clock, such as adding additional clocks to the Notification Center or changing your time synchronisation server, can now be done in Settings. Format settings for time and date have also been moved into Settings, which is a welcome change for anyone dealing with mysterious cases where Windows somehow insists on using anything but the sane 24-hour clock.
As for language settings, things like enabling Unicode UTF-8 support is now available in Settings as well, and you can now copy existing language and regions settings from one user to another, and to the welcome screen. Lastly, keyboard settings like the character repeat/delay rate and blink rates are now also in Settings.
It’s absolutely wild to me that Windows still has two separate places to change settings, and that countless settings dialogs still look like they came straight from Windows 95. It’s a reply fractured user experience, and one that’s been in place since the release of Settings in Windows 8, 13 years ago.
The curve Windows is graded on compared to its competitors has basically become a circle. People write entire treatises about how Linux is not ready for the desktop because of some entirely arbitrary and nebulous reasons, while at the same time Windows users are served a hodgepodge of 30 years of random cruft without anyone even so much as raising an eyebrow.
I’ve long argued that if you truly take a step back and look at the landscape of desktop operating systems today, and you were to apply the same standards to all of them, there’s no chance in hell Windows can be considered “ready for the desktop”. The fact Windows has had two competing settings applications 13 years now with no end in sight is just one facet of that conclusion, but definitely an emblematic one.
No end in sight? Surely we must be getting significantly closer… Or do you posit it’s like Zeno’s paradox, every iteration only eliminating half as many control panel options, approaching but never quite able to reach less than 1? 😀
Don’t worry about it, microsoft will “ai” in a solution to the problem.
Unfortunely I keep waiting to get GNU/Linux laptops with 100% supported hardware, available on Media Markt, Saturn, FNAC, Cool Blue, Carrefour, Vorbis,…..
There was never any need to make “Settings”. Windows Control Panel was perfect. Settings on the other hand is bloated and buggy. Sometimes it won’t even open. There must be a return back to simple fast UI’s not built with scripting/CSS and HTML.
The “Settings” app was created alongside the Start Screen and the other Metro junk back in Windows 8 so Microsoft could chase tablet/hybrid sales, and they are still chasing those tablet/hybrid sales 13 years later.
Personally, I don’t understand why the majority of users on desktops and laptops are still subjected to this awful UI. Initially, it was because Microsoft thought that if they forced desktop and laptop users like you and me to the Metro UI, we’d buy Metro/UWP apps from their Microsoft Marketplace and create demand, but that never happened. At this point, you’d expect they’d quit and give us back the Windows 7 UI and keep the Metro UI just for tablets and hybrids, but nope.
Too many sunken costs with WinRT, WinUI, from the people with some OKRs on Windows team.
If you look around Github projects for WinRT, WinIU, CsWinRT, C++/WinRT, it has been a mess and mostly developers that painfully still believe there is something on WinUI, ranting about the existing tooling support, bugs and lack of features.
Meanwhile every single time the Windows team talks publicly about WinUI/WinAppSDK, it is as if everthing was great.
And what you people don’t understand is that the whole “not ready for the desktop” chant was always a red herring thrown around by Microsoft and Apple to distract from the fact the value of their OSes was always the hardware and software ecosystems around them. Because admitting the latter would open anti-trust investigations (as it eventually did).
Also, Desktop Linux is unique in the sense it tries to be less compatible, such as making it difficult to install proprietary GPU drivers or not supporting Widevine L1 and L2, but that’s another rant for another day.
But back on topic, nobody buys Windows because they like they UI, they buy it because it’s compatible with the hardware and software they’ve got. Desktop Linux people look at the Windows UI and think Windows is an easy opponent, in reality, they’d have better chance trying to attract MacOS users (since MacOS has a much narrower software ecosystem that’s easier to make work in Wine).
As long as I can still hit Win+R and run ncpa.cpl, I’m fine.
Thom,
I’d say the reason is not arbitrary at all. It is very simple: compatibility
While not as strong as before, Microsoft spends countless resources to make sure older software, even ancient ones still run.
There used to be videos where people upgraded from older versions to the current one. I have not watched this particular new one, but they can now do it all the way from Windows 1.0 to Windows 11 going through each version at a time:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cwXX5FQEl88
Linux?
You are lucky if you can compile older code, let alone run them on modern systems.
(Linux kernel is also very good at backwards compatibility. But you’d then need to statically link everything, which to be honest almost nobody does. And even then the UI will not be backwards compatible thanks to Wayland decisions)
As long as this exists, people will stick with Windows.