Microsoft formally deprecates the Windows Control Panel

I’m a little split on it. I don’t actually mind their streamlining because of the way I windows. Which is professionally and for video games. I wouldn’t use windows professionally if I had a choice (company policy, and one I get from an ops perspective), but at least every setting is taken care for me. I wouldn’t really use windows for video games either, but the fact that they are removing more and more of the “use windows” part means that my only windows machine is basically just a console at this point with how little I have to interact with it.

I do understand where you’re coming from. Which is the flip side of it, but what I don’t understand is why anyone really wants to use Windows in 2024. I’m not a huge fan of the direction Apple is going with their continuous platform lockin, but the smallest MacBook Air is cheap and works better than anything that runs windows. Similarly Chromebooks are actually just fine, ok maybe not outside the context of windows/macos/chromeos. I chose the Apple lock-in because my families likes iOS, but I would have been fine with Google.

If you like to tinker and own your OS there is still Linux.

Professionally I think Microsoft is doing fine. They have a functional monopoly on enterprise organisations, especially the 99% (citation = made up) which aren’t tech related. So it’s probably a decent enough strategy for them. Hell, I think the primary reason they don’t have a cheap device to compete with MacBook airs and Chromebooks is because they know windows would lose.

The Windows 11 networking experience is beyond awful. It's incredible how bad it is.

I think that Microsoft is extremely short-sighted here. They're clearly pursuing next quarter growth. They're turning away from people who are willing to be the first adopters and free marketers. Therefore, those people will indeed turn away, adopt something else, and then start convincing everyone else to go along with them.

Of course it will take a while because Linux is still a complete mess on desktop, but the number of people willing to put their time into making it work slowly but steadily keeps increasing.

What sort of fancy configs do you have going on? What do you need to change in the network settings? Why aren't you using DHCP options? You need a static Windows 10/11 IP address?

I just don't get why you need to fuck with the networking on a device that is almost 100% getting DHCP. If you feel the need to mess with the network settings in Windows, you're kind of doing it wrong.

If you're going to have the l33t M$ sucks attitude, learn to set up your network properly and it's not an issue.

I think this is done on purpose.

Many companies have basically reached perfection (or at least as good as it's going to get), but they still need to justify their existence. Another example of this is Osprey backpacks. If you bought one in the last couple of decades then it's basically all the same. But what they do is keep churning out new designs year on year, all 90% the same but they wiggle around that line of perfection ensuring some years have something good but also something bad that they can improve on next time (despite the fact the "improvement" is just from the design of 3 years back). This has been Microsoft's model also for a long time now.

I echo your sentiment in these regards. It is much easier to do certain tasks in Control Panel (Networking and Power Options being the two biggest examples of this in my opinion), while other things are easier in Settings.

I think the real problem is that Microsoft hasn't place enough focus on getting the Settings app correct from a UI/UX perspective like Apple did with their Settings app. There's nothing technical preventing them from offering a streamlined experience in Settings that allows you to easily configure advanced settings when necessary. It's just design effort on their part.

If they can get their Settings app to the point where nobody wants to use Control Panel anymore, then that's the right time to deprecate it.

I’m pretty sure others have other gripes with the “streamlined experience”.

Christmas tree UX. Navigating the UI at places is like playing a RPG with all the weird intricate click paths.

The main gripe is they seem to think we use it on a touch interface for tablet, so it makes no sense visually on desktop

The second gripe is they seem to add features to it whenever they change something in windows, so older stuff that doesn't change because it doesn't need to is not in it

Cannot agree more. I actually run into much worse scenarios with network config on Windows 11 before. Could not set DNS manually with settings app. Had to turned to control panel, but again, could not set IP address manually. Tried to use command line, broken too. Eventually had to combine the 3 and spent hours to complete a simply task should have been finished in 30 seconds. For sure, that's really great experience.

I think the status quo Control Panel moves apart to dumb Settings and limitless command line.

"configuring a network interface"

Each network card configuration dialogue has a box for "default gateway". As a result an entire generation of people have some very strange ideas about how routing works for a host with more than one network interface. That UI has persisted since at least Win 95 and Win NT.

I’m pretty sure others have other gripes with the “streamlined experience”.

A simple thing I find infuriating is that the entire 'app' is a singleton. I can't have one window open in one submenu with another window in another submenu, despite no direct relation.

Every OS I regularly lose seems to have lost track of the value of multitasking. Perhaps a side effect of them being treated as a tool to launch a browser.

On the topic of network settings, in Windows 11, the Settings app and Control Panel can actually end up conflicting if you mess with both.

A while back I was messing with IPv6, trying to get it to work my desktop the way I wanted it to, and ended up in a situation where I needed to change both settings that existed only in the new Settings app and settings that existed only in Control Panel, and after a while the Settings app just started throwing an error when trying to save IP settings. The entire thing is a mess.

You think this process is simple and easy to understand?:

https://se.mathworks.com/help/comm/usrpradio/ug/configure-et...

...maybe because you are used to it, but this process has confused me since I was 14. My eyes go blank and I just hammer out the inside-out learned clicks to get to that final screen. Compare this to the MacOS flow: Settings -> Network -> Port -> Details... It looks like the Windows 11 flow is similar to MacOS.

As always, Windows problem is that they keep interfaces unchanged until they're completely outdated. Then they completely replace them with new ones, nullifying the users experience with the old ones. They instead should gradually update components so that users have time to adapt.

it doesn’t even show you how long that interface has been connected to the network and how much data was transferred both ways

it does show that

But... don't the control panel windows have more functionality (and usability) in practice?

Yes, and they're not alone even in the FOSS world (cough ...Gnome... cough).

My take on this is that someone decided that everything must either run on a cellphone or conform to its UI, therefore GUIs are slowly moving to the mobile touch screen model, which translates into leaving lots of unused space because of the bigger size of finger tips compared to mouse pointers that could trigger errors with smaller and more dense controls, and of course less controls because smaller screens with comparable resolution to much larger monitors would make them much harder to operate.

I can understand the reason, however all comes from the 1st mistake which is the attempt to unify everything to a mobile UI, probably to save on development time. It's unnecessary and it's wrong.

You don’t enjoy the modern white space heavy configuration to be split almost multiple pages? Win10, I have to scroll to see the entire sound options on a single non-exhaustive page given the comically low information density.

The new pages seem designed by someone who only knew how to build a vertical layout and just stacked all controls without a care for the user. I am also amused how the modern window takes a good second plus to paint.

I will deeply abhor the new Settings app until they go back 30 years and rediscover multitasking. It's pure insanity that I can't have two Settings windows open in different locations at the same time. Instead, if I'm doing one thing (like the volume mixer) and need to quickly check my Bluetooth devices, I have to navigate to the Bluetooth screen from the volume mixer, then I need to navigate back to the volume mixer.

Sorry, what the hell is this? Do engineers at Microsoft actually think this is sensible, usable and accessible?

I've had the new settings app get stuck and become unable to interact with. Not to mention all the missing settings that the old control panel still hangs on to.

My favorite is Windows deciding to choose the default printer for me. I normally keep the printer turned off unless I'm actually printing something. As a result, several applications (LibreOffice off the top of my head but there have been several others) started hanging for several seconds on a dialog box on launch trying to connect to my powered down printer. So I go into the "new and improved" printer settings screen and select the Microsoft Print to PDF, thinking I'll set it to the default to bypass the issue. Except there is no option to set it as the default. I eventually go back to the main printer setting screen and realize it's possible to scroll down (not sure about light mode, but in dark mark it's hard to notice the scroll bar automatically). I scroll down and see some stupid "Let Windows manage my default printer" checkbox that got added (and enabled by default) in some recent update. I uncheck it and yay I can change my default printer.

Meanwhile in the old devices and printers control panel it was just right click -> set as default printer

I used to vastly prefer the old control panel hands down but the last couple of years it has been in that awkward "a lot is better on the new one but not everything" stage.

E.g. on the legacy "Sounds" none of the per app mixing, device pairing, or new filters like toggling global mono mixing are there. Some power user things are also just easier, like adjusting the non-primary sound device volume doesn't require going into the device properties and flipping to the tab for each device you want to change the volume of - it's more combined.

On the flipside the legacy "Sounds" disabled devices didn't clutter the view and there are advanced options not present in the new sections. It's also much more space efficient... though sometimes to its detriment in that the windows can't be made larger and it relies a lot on modals which can be easy to misplace and get confused on (but also useful in that they can let you see more of the information without having to flip back to other screens).

That repeats for me about everywhere. Either alone I'd probably be more than happy to use at this point but that there are two places to go each offering not quite the same set of features is the real pain point.

It's Windows 11. Functionality and usability are not priorities here.

And the settings network configuration is absolutely useless.

But why would all this matter if deprecating the control panel is on someone's KPI? KPI is their only god. There is no place for reason or engineering excellence.

But... don't the control panel windows have more functionality (and usability) in practice?

Not only that but many pieces of the Fisher Price Settings interface still redirect to the Control Panel to get you whatever setting you're after that isn't supported.

Hopefully this means they actually completed porting it all over, rather than just destroying huge swathes of functionality. Given Microsoft's track record... 60/40.

they've been slowly adding things to 11's settings menus and I understand why people might think the new one is more user friendly, but things like easily accessing wifi networks properties is more convoluted.

I dread the day they remove the old panel. I use the "large cursor" accessibility feature (usable from the new control panel) so that my cursor is clearly visible at all times, but it is almost unusable for programming by default because the cursor for text hovering is centered (so it's not clear at all where the cursor points to when the text cursor covers multiple lines). The way to make it usable is to edit the mouse theme to change the text cursor to something that is not centered, which requires the old mouse options.

In an ideal world, they would fix this problem by making bigger mouse cursors automatically use some proper non-centered text selection cursor, but I don't have much hope for that. I guess there will be some way through the registry in any case. Maybe we'll see alternative control panels with more features?

Maybe I'm getting old, but I vastly prefer the legacy control panel.

Their continued push to enshittify something that the world has come to know as standard was actually the final straw for me moving to Linux full time. I just thought that if I'm gonna be changing it might as well be something that isn't going to show me ads and farm me for data.

The new settings stuff is materially worse than the old stuff.

This depends on who your audience is, and I'm shocked by this community not seeing it.

The new settings are far more intuitive for non-experience users who are more comfortable with an iPad than a traditional computer. That's where the market is. The enthusiast demographic who actually understands what the settings mean and how the machine works is minuscule.

And the usability is worse.

This isn't exclusive to Microsoft, but it seems like all the research that went into Windows 95 isn't being repeated for new software. Windows 95, despite its flaws had actual UX research going into designing the project. It doesn't seem like that type of work is being done anymore, Apple also isn't exactly perfect here either, their new control/settings app is equally awful.

There's is an aversion to making software boring, but functional, but that's what most of us need. Microsoft could have frozen their UI in Windows 2000 era and it would have been fine for the majority of uses.

All this engineering effort for what?

So developers who are otherwise incompetent can justify their employment and companies can virtue-signal their identity politics.

engineering

the appropriate idiom is "development effort" -- engineering as a discipline is not at all applicable here.

Here’s one example of why it takes ages — drivers that grab the window handle of a control panel and hack at it to show custom UI. Old example that specifically addresses the Displays and Printers control panels, but similar hacks probably still exist today.

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20060410-17/?p=32...

When you have no external business to compete with you end up with managers competing internally. They're literally just burning cash trying to look busy and distinguished.

Anyways.. watch any Microsoft "vision of the future" video from 1990 and it's basically just Teams. It took them 30 years to fully establish the steaming pile of bizarre Share Point plugins that is Teams.

The most genuinely bad and frustrating part of the new control panel that made me ask "did literally anyone even test this for 5 minutes" are any of the pages where you have a list of things longer than 6 or 7 items. Like per-app sound device options, or associating a program with a file extension, or even just uninstalling a program.

* No way to search or filter the list, or jump to the extension I want (PDF), let me first scroll past .3gp, etc

* List items are comically large, it must be like 10% of the information density from before

* The whole thing is just sloooooww

A regression in every sense of the word :(

Not to mention all the things that are straight up missing from the new control panel, like all the right-click options currently available in the Audio Devices dialog.

I so badly wish they'd open-source Windows. It wasn't bad enough that they refuse to fix obviously bad code, but they also don't allow the very many talented performance engineers submit PRs that would do in a month what they couldn't get done in years.

By the time Windows 8 rolled around Microsoft wanted a 'unified' UX across devices so bad that they threw the desktop and laptop users completely under the bus. Most people can barely remember just how unusable the first new UX Word was on a laptop screen before years of reluctant rollbacks reclaimed some screen realestate for actual work. But hey, "Just imagine 30% app store revenue for every application on every PC" is a powerfull enough motivator to sacrifice even the UX on.

Next up: Device Manager

;-(

Based on my experience in a similar large company environment, this looks very much on point.

You, sir/ma'am, are a genius. I've actually seen this happen to quite some extent.

I feel this is exactly what happened to JetBrains IDEA abysmal "redesign"...

Ironically, the same company showed how to perfectly execute a settings page in Visual Studio Code: It's searchable, has a consistent and intuitive grouping, a simple way to get help for each individual setting and an import/export functionality. But I suppose, it's from a different department...

If you ever tried using Settings and search.

First commands I run on a new install/user.

    :: Disable Web from Taskbar Search
    reg add HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Search /v BingSearchEnabled /t REG_DWORD /d 0 /f
    reg add HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Search /v BingSearchEnabled /t REG_DWORD /d 0 /f
    reg add HKCU\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Windows /v DisableSearchBoxSuggestions /t REG_DWORD /d 1 /f

Usually, I have no particular nostalgia for old designs—everyone praises Windows 3.1 but to me it's just eye-searing. But, even I can't stand the new search. A nontrivial amount of the time—and on two different machines IIRC—I'll open the search menu and type something, but my keystrokes just don't register. I have to close and reopen the start menu. And, actually opening the start menu takes a noticeably long time. I don't know if it's doing some last-minute indexing or something, but it's very annoying.

And the same is true for the settings app. I never really use the Control Panel–specific settings, and whitespace doesn't bother me, so I'm not inherently opposed to the new app. But the execution just feels subpar somehow—if I had to guess, it's probably the latency whenever you click anything.

(macOS also has all kinds of weird UI bugs too, e.g. the Bluetooth and sound dropdowns in the top menubar are very finicky for me. And System Preferences proper isn't much better. It drives me crazy....)

The whole point of search is to send you to Edge. They have no motivation to fix search, only to push more of their products. If you want a better life, abandon ship.

They should first fix their search.

#1: Stop re-running a file search on sort.

The only way to get the right app from the search bar is typing its first letter, but type a second letter and it will completely miss it.

Can recommend EverythingToolbar + Everything + StartAllBack

fixes 90% of my gripes with Windows.

Strong agree. How come when I search for Teams in the start menu, it doesn't bring up Teams as the first option, even though it is in the start menu?

My most frustrated moment was discovering that windows 11 requires a network connection to set it up. It blocks on the user creation screen until you decide to add a microsoft account or create a new one. There's no other OS I know of that does the same thing.

"Services" and "Disk Management" UI's are great examples of ollllld (possibly MFC?) Windows UI's and are still the standard way to manage those settings from what I can tell.

I wonder if Windows will eventually move to an "image" based approach like macOS has done. When one updates macOS or iOS, you basically download a multi-GB sealed image of the OS and install it in-place.

CPLs are quite small and a small number of files to support it.

This will add another UI style, so of course it will increase the installation size. People need more scattered UI languages, not less!

/s

I wish Windows 7 was usable today, I'd switch back in a heartbeat. The peak of integrated and easy UI/UX on Windows was 7, and it went downwards after that.

Nothing the current Microsoft does will ever reduce the installation footprint of Windows.

My Windows 11 taskbar looks just how I liked it on Windows 10 and prior. Adjust your settings.

For MOST of your gaming needs: https://www.protondb.com/

Valve's done a LOT of good for moving the ball on Windows things just working (mostly) on Linux. Usually it's some form of DRM or video playback that doesn't work... for obvious reasons.

I finally started running Linux as my main (and only) OS after hating what Microsoft has done with 11. I'm not a Microsoft hater, and while I like Linux I'm not the type of person to play with new distros everyday or heavily customize my system.

They finally did it. It works. I can just install Steam and play Hunt: Showdown and join a discord call. It's all I really wanted.

In fact every game I want to play works out of the box, and there's dozens across various genres. For an example list: Guild Wars 2, Stellaris, Crusader Kings 3, Counter-Strike 2, Dota 2, Baldurs Gate 3, Sea of Thieves, Halo Infinite are just some of the games I've been playing recently.

Hunt recently shipped a major update and it broke Proton support. Within a day Valve fixed it and it now works fine.

That's just a link to the "All Tasks" view of Control Panel with some extra characters stuck in front, not an actual separate mode. If deprecating the Control Panel only ever means the main Control Panel view and shortcut itself then that will be an alternative. If deprecating the Control Panel means eventually these views, and their associated tools, go away too then this will be no different.

Many of those items in God Mode direct you to Settings app now. The only way left is netsh and powershell.

It's good to know that exists, but having to rename a folder on the desktop to a magic incantation with a GUID in it is not an acceptable replacement for the previous control panel.

That is pretty cool

One of my favorites is "dialer.exe". I wonder how many have actually made a phone call with it on Windows 11. I'd expect more than 0... just not sure how much more.

It's actually amazing how old Windows is, and how many vestigial bits of ancient GUI versions are still a part of the OS.

This popped today: https://pr0gramm.com/top/6301382

This is all modern examples but there are still bits hidden deeply within system that come from 9x times. I remember when MS published interface guidelines with Vista but the document was quickly forgotten and picture above shows all that mess. Personally, I remember almost all Ribbon UI changes and Windows Live brand "refreshes".

There were community attempts to polish interface initiated by Long Zheng, an user experience entrepreneur from Melbourne : Aero and Win7 Taskforce where you could submit all these inconsistencies and provide mockups (if you were able to do so). I'm pretty sure there were people from MS who took this unique feedback into consideration and some suggestions were implemented but with Windows 8 and 10 all these efforts become meaningless.

It’s not only that but it’s also that drivers could ship custom property pages in an accompanying DLL. All using property page / dialog box classic Win32 technology.

So unless you have a locked down device like a phone, you can’t magically port everything over to a new settings app without providing a path for your ISV / IHV ecosystem to migrate to on timelines that are sensible for the business. And ‘drivers’ consists of way more than hardware devices: database access drivers etc etc.

Part of me wonders if an AI model couldn’t just sandbox the old UI and inspect it, and then auto map to a new settings style AI.

Aaah the windows network applet. I still remember fiddling with ipx/spx settings in that interface. It's been several decades! Good memories.

No choice about DNS server info or DNS suffixes, no way to edit adapter settings (jumbo frames etc) and so on.

Hasn't been true for a while. You can get to all of that from the Settings app these days.

What is more likely is that the UI for those setting go away and you'll be told that to do advanced things you need to use the netsh tool.

I think the time taken has less to do with the size of the rewrite and more to do with highlighting Microsoft's level of interest (from a business perspective, not an ideological one) in working on the control panel. E.g. in the same time period Microsoft has migrated and rewritten their enterprise chat platform multiple times across different architectures, frontends, and backends. That's not a point that large rewrites always only take a couple of years, it's a point that they were really interested in evolving their enterprise chat offering.

You start to do a rewrite and then discover that the old design was the right one. But then you double down on those because "metrics" which oddly favors the team/company interests.

I'm not sure if its about "small rewrites" so much as slowly changing so that there's less all at once rejection and pushback. It's change management.

I think that's just marketing. As a decision maker, I care more what works.

80% of my tech support tickets for desktop help are from my Mac users which are only 8% of my endpoints. In my research, and experience, forcing Windows reduced calls and decreased costs because questions like "how do I send this file to..." and "how do I connect to this server" were eliminated.

Further, SMB doesn't work very well for Mac users. Try opening a network share with hundreds of thousands of images.

And last but surely not least, it's hard to secure company data on Macs because Active Directory integration is also broken. Sure, you use Apple's MDM solution, for added cost, complexity and training.

Anecdotally, I've seen Windows users quickly move to the top of the company while their seniors using Macs stay at the bottom because they constantly have difficulty being part of the team. Problems with sharing files, joining meetings, color schemes and profiles that don't match their counterparts', etc. All these little things add up and make for a difficult career path to advancement when you're constantly the odd one out having problems sharing and showing your work product.

Or, on Windows, I can deal with Google searches to find where a setting has moved to.

I'll take the Google searches.

It was time to move to Linux ever since Windows Vista ;)

It's been 10 years or more where I learned to use windows. I haven't used windows since longer than a few minutes.

The control panel is the last thing that was familiar to me. I am sure Powershell works great, but coming from Linux that feels like a badly designed pain not even shipping with a useable terminal.

And don't get me wrong I hatet that control panel. But I was able to get things done without a lot of prior knowledge of the system.

expose all the settings, consistently, in a single programmatic way.

That is the registry. It has an API and everything.

apart from being an incomplete way to control all the settings

Well, if you want "all the settings," so you have to accept 'all the complexity' that comes with that. A decent example would be VLANs. They offer a very complex configuration surface if you consider all the deployment and standard options combined with the fact that not all cards and drivers implement them in whole or in part.

It can be resized vertically, but the UI is lay out in a way that it doesn't make sense to resize it horizontally (not saying that I like that UI layout, but it has got a reason for the limitation).

MacOS UX has remained pretty stable.

The settings app has felt like a kludge ever since they introduced it.

I never bother to manually set file associations, when I find a file that doesn't open in the right app I just use the "Open with > Other app > always use this app" option to set it

Their user base is large corporations.

If she can't manage to find Excel and Outlook, I'm sorry but that's a skill issue. It's not that different.

The easier way would be to right click the start button. That's been a thing for ages. Second easiest would be to search for devices in the start menu.

But since you rarely use it it's tough to remember in the moment