Thanks Ballmer for QA.
There is/was a new Windows 10 Control panel? I thought that was just the Settings app.
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The settings app is the new control panel. There’s just also the legacy control panel that they’ve been trying to remove for years. It’s such a shit show that I’ve memorized the run string for the applets I have to use frequently, because it’s a fucking nightmare trying to remember where they moved this in which version of the os.
Keep them memorized. The old tools just work, even if MICROS~1 tries to hide them and replace them with useless crap apps.
Man, the Device and Printers one is long as hell lol
shell:::{A8A91A66-3A7D-4424-8D24-04E180695C7A}Try
Control printersMuch easier
Huh, on Win 11 24H2 this opens the Modern Device and Printers instead of the control panel one.
Interesting. Guessing that probably means I need to find a new trick when I go to work on newer servers. Damned microsoft…
The thing with the Control panel (speaking as a former Windows user up until a year ago) was its consistency. Since the Aero era things have remained in more-or-less the same place. Sure, some things got added, some renamed and some deleted, but the basics I needed (mouse sensitivity, battery settings on the laptop, the Add/remove software page, search indexing, printers) has all stayed in more or less the same place.
Then 10 happened. And sure, Settings was great for a lot of stuff. But when Settings didn’t have the option (or I lost my nerves trying to find it), Control Panel was the way to go. I’d find what I needed pretty much instantly, since was always one of the same 20-odd things I need.
Even then, everything just seemed faster in Control panel. Was it more responsive? Were there less animations? Were more things crammed into one screen so less clicking and scrolling was involved? Is it just my imagination?
Honestly, I don’t know.
By the time I got used to the new Settings app, one of the big Windows 10 makeovers happened and jumbled up about 10% of Settings. Objectively not much, but just enough to irritate.
And now with 11, they not only made Settings unrecognizable, they also cranked the spyware up to, well, 11. And there’s no Control Panel to default on when in doubt (or fuming with rage).
All in all, while Control Panel wan’t what kept me on Windows, 11 losing it did ease the transition, since it meant having to learn a new way of doing things either way. Might as well make it a way that hopefully won’t change once a random design exec decides “this is ugly and it has to go”.
Honestly, KDE Plasma’s Settings are where it’s at. It’s right between the functional and informstional density of Control panel and the simplicity, visual appeal and saner structure of Settings. Shame it uses Qt, which from what I hear, is god-awful as far as UI toolchains go.
I have worked with Qt, it’s not that bad to be honest.
Kde settings impressed me. I had to fix my mouse and put the wheel on backwards. Took me a few hours messing around regedit to find it. In kde control panel its just a toggle.
Also funny thing is windows backup control panel has 3 options and advanced options. Advanced options lists the same 3 options.
Well that was interesting to read
Which control panel? There’s like 20 of them and a new worse one gets added every other year.
I’ve heard an ex microsoft employee said in a blog once that the windows team has no seniors. Anyone who has worked there for one or two years has left for better employers. Nobody knows how to refactor or maintain old codebases, so instead, they just write new things on top of the old things. The windows kernel has hardly changed since XP.
This sounds 100% credible, based on the outcomes we can see
This makes sense, most of that explanation in the screenshot reeks of novices working with something they don’t understand.
Copying and pasting a current example and changing the names… yep.
Instead of making it worse you could extract it to a new file. Make an interface. Write a unit test. Anything.
The guy wonders why the file is 15k lines long and then describes exactly why.
Right? Like my dude, bare minimum at least write down those steps in a text document so you can reference it the next time you have to add something. Bonus points for putting it on some shared internal wiki or whatever Microsoft uses.
I don’t think anybody gets paid enough to write that down. In fact, they might get punished for wasting company time. They could open source it and people would automatically fix these things. Who knows.
Or write a tool that can do all these steps for you, reliably!
The windows kernel has hardly changed since XP.
Windows NNT when? Surely from a business/competition perspective they can’t let Linux get that many years ahead of them in terms of kernel optimisations?
thats what happens when short term profit is king I guess
Then you have to go into a resource file and find a very specific resource ID for your control panel string, and create a new resource ID to me it to.
Ah yes the joys of working with Microsoft Foundation Classes (MFC), Back in the day I supported a VS6.0 application, you have room for 65535 UI elements in an application (Including DLL’s) I had to split the ID’s up in ranges to enable adding new elements in a sane way.
and people complain about wayland.
I’m now wondering if microsoft still even has the legacy control panel code.
The “True Facts About Microsoft” and Zefrank reference got me :D
I wanna believe that this is fake.
But I expect it is not.
pretty much every windows GUI framework is trash or a pain in the ass to deal with except for Avalonia (my beloved), but it’s more cross platform.
I’m not sure if this is 100% real but it very well could be. although imo makes me think of skill issue (not because the system makes sense, but these problems don’t really seem like problems to me, just minor set backs)
This is why everything is a goddamn web app now.
well, no. everything is a god damn web app because everything runs browsers.
so why write native (device) applications if the device can run a browser ? just write code for the browser, which also runs on desktop. now you have a cross platform app without needing 5 different teams
I haven’t done much with UI in general, but the one time I thought of making some UI stuff in windows I gave up.
Even modifying an existing .net program someone else made for a feature I wanted was a nightmare.
Yep, I was shocked to see that there is no defacto 1st party framework and during my time searching online I found lots of “use x, use y, no y is dead and none uses it, no x is terrible” which is how I found Avalonia.
I still don’t think there’s a solid Windows gui framework, but I haven’t looked in years.
…maybe it’s better that the Windows source code remain closed.
At the same time, I’d love to see the developers of the world glimpse at that eldritch cognitohazard and collectively go insane.
At least modern hardware runs the spaghetti code much better than Windows XP used to run.
i view it less as spaghetti and more as a rat king
Maybe we’ve been misunderstanding what Closed Source really is this whole time?
It’s a codex holding back “eldritch cognitohazard” horrors that the technopriests of Microsoft have captured and tamed into an operating system. Releasing the source would release the beasts into our reality, much like the plot of John Carpenters In the Mouth of Madness.
Well, figured out one good reason for closed source, I guess. Let’s not solve this LeMarchand’s Box.
At least control panel is better than “Settings” trying to find shit in that is hell.
Can confirm. I worked as a contract program manager for Microsoft with O365, Azure Gloval Ecosystrm, and yes, the dreaded Windows team. I wakk out out my last two Microsoft jobs in the middle of a shift. I would do it again.
OH MY F… GOD! I knew it is witchcraft but I didn’t knew that is is so awful!
