My issue with Control Panel is there’s no clear delineation between OS and distribution software and installed software.
On Windows, a program you install at any time may do anything like:
Have a settings menu inside the application
Have a separate settings utility install alongside with it that may or may not be accessible from the main application
Place an applet on the control panel
A combination of any 2 or 3 of the above
Bonus: App has registry entries it doesn’t tell you about that address options for which there are no GUI representations.
The whole thing is extremely arbitrary and made for a very different world where programs you’d install would be fairly limited in number. Nowadays I have no idea what software runs on my Windows rig and how much of it there is. Between flight simming, racing simming and all the third party crap for all that plus the crap for the peripherals, the endless esoteric drivers for various gear I’ve used for audio and video recording and playback, helper utilities, virtual audio cables, virtual midi cables, virtual ethernet, virtual mouse, virtual GPU etc etc. Recently I found some kind of Sony audio driver on the control panel. Apparently it came with a Sony DAP I used to use that could be used as a DAC.
What makes this worse is that the Control Panel’s actual included items are not standardized in any way. Any applet could have sixteen submenus across three windows and tabs or one. Microsoft was trying to paper over it since Vista and as always just created more barriers. Microsoft is like a slumlord painting over mold and rotting walls with each update.
This just doesn’t happen on Linux.
On Linux a GUI settings manager on Gnome and KDE alike will only feature things relevant to the OS configuration and maybe some for bundled pre-installed software. All the settings menus on Gnome are uniform, and most are uniform on KDE. I talk shit on KDE’s insane defaults (touchpad settings and minimize all windows applet) but I found the right settings immediately.
On Windows, I don’t even know where those settings are, there are some ideas on where I could look but it’s honestly faster to just Google it than to guess around where the touchpad settings are.
Windows’ attempts to implement this through a unified settings menu is to paper over how the settings themselves were made to be configured through a spaghetti of menus on the control panel, and as such when displayed through a unified settings menu the order and groupings come off as completely arbitrary and nonsensical, and then some options are just outright missing from the Settings menu that are present in the control panel.
It provides neither the features existing users expect nor simplicity that would help new users.
What’s worse is that Windows also has to be an ad vessel to make the line go up. Therefore to add to the confusion, the settings menu has to act as a vessel for promoting Microsoft products and thus prominently feature OneDrive, Windows Defender (not even called that anymore), to appear as if they’re integral parts of the OS and not applications and services I can choose to not use.
Surprisingly this is also an issue on iOS. I frequently find useful settings for apps in the iOS settings app and not the actual app. It feels so funny that iOS is this highly polished experience, and then you get some crummy Bullshit Calculator app with “restore premium and-free VIP subscription” in the official settings app. Takes some of the sheen off, for sure.