There a lot of non AI implementations that would be more reliably logical, like presenting options in multiple groups instead of only having a single location buried in submenus.
Like mouse color and size could be in an appearence AND in a general mouse settings that includes mouse appearance and behavior. They could design it so the setting itself is self contained, so it can behave the same way no matter how it is grouped for presentation.
I would expect AI to make up illogical groupings, because it doesn’t understand context.
Even more frustrating is that different releases and builds recategorize where certain settings are entirely. To the point where search is the only reliable way of knowing for sure you’ll get to the right place. They haven’t changed things too drastically recently but they kept moving shit around in Win10 throughout its lifetime.
The older and older I get in life, the more and more I want my digital product interfaces to remain as static as possible. I’m not anti new features, but I want the ability to persist the OG interface I’m used to, the state in which I know WHERE things are, and HOW to utilize them.
I don’t want app icons to change without my consent. I want zero rebranding, name or color changes. I don’t want to be forced to change services due to enshittification, and learn how to fit new ones into my workflows.
One of the core problems with the modern world is confusion of information. Our brains were not designed to handle the infinite layer of abstractions, dozens/hundreds of separate systems, each with potentially hundreds or thousands of different configurations. Every time a major update occurs it breaks my mums tech illiterate brain more and more, and she stops using digital products more and more.
I get the feeling, but in my experience it has more to do with the windows UI actual getting worse. When I use Linux, I’m happy to try out different desktop environments and shells, but they have one thing in common: they have designs that are created more thoughtfully.
It’s not just us growing old, it’s the world of technology growing shittier too!
My uncle can navigate windows xp with his eyes closed. It took me years to get him there. He was fine with vista and 7. When 8 hit, it was over and it has been since.
This is a religious man who I’ve only ever heard cuss twice in his life before, and they were the milder words. “What the fuck is copy as a path? I’m just trying to copy and paste a file to my Zip drive! I can’t find computer, I can’t find my computer. I can’t find copy and paste! I’m gonna throw this thing across the room! Seriously, show more options? Why not leave the options I’ve had since 1996 where they were? Do people just not copy and paste any more?”
I have given up and I just remote connect and do it for him. He tried for a few years with the “slow down and let me learn” thing but he’s almost 70 and he’s given up.
He calls his usb drives “zip drives”. He was the only person I knew who had an actual Zip drive when I was a kid and I loved it.
They need to finish Settings before doing that. Control Panel is almost always the easier way to accomplish things and still the only way to accomplish some IIRC.
And you can have more than one instance open at a time, instead of having the sound page open and when you try to bring up bluetooth next to it it changes the first one instead.
This is so frustrating when trouble shooting - trying to re-find where that one settings page was because you opened another.
It’s not a phone - it’s a windowing desktop environment. Allow multiple instances!
They literally already tried and failed with the phoneification of windows when everyone shat on 8. I guess some ahole UI designer still works there and is bitter that people didn’t like their ideas.
I had to do a lot of configuration work on Win10 computers lately. The MMC, Powershell, even Regedit are faster and more intuitive than Settings. It’s fucking ridiculous.
Settings in Windows 11 is close. I rarely find myself going to control panel when it was about 50/50 in Windows 10. Still more clicks than I would like but workable.
it’s a very good tipping point dude. settings is so complicated to navigate and is very slow. not to mention control panel still has more features than settings
That seems reasonable. Especially since there’s no equivalent to the already half-assed solution that is the control panel on Linux.
OSX style settings menus are far better than either the travesty that is the win 10 settings or the aging and questionably designed control panel, especially when it’s all tightly integrated with the OS and utilities, and that’s present in every Linux DE under the sun.
EDIT: I should clarify that by “already half-assed solution that is the control panel”, I meant that the Windows Control Panel was always a half-assed solution in comparison to what OSX and Linux DEs do with proper settings manager applications.
On Linux DEs, a settings manager like Settings in OSX is usually present, and it is a far better solution.
I agree with your point about OS X style menus, they’ve been steadily going downhill since “macOS” though. Granted, they’re still uphill of whatever the fuck Microsoft seems to think of.
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.
I phrased that very poorly. I’ll edit the above to clarify.
I meant that the Windows Control Panel was always a half-assed solution in comparison to what OSX and Linux DEs do with proper settings manager applications.
On Linux DEs, a settings manager like Settings in OSX is usually present, and it is a far better solution.
Just start with Linux mint and cinnamon or kde desktop environment. You should be good to go with that. Kernels are not something that you usually need to worry about, the default should work fine. If you need to, it’s easy to switch to another kernel by just installing it through the package manager.
I’m enjoying a dual boot with Nobara_Gnome_Nvidia. Just finished the game with my first character on Tiny Tina’s Wonderland without issue. My only gripe would be how that particular game takes a minute to optimize shaders at the initial game start. Glorious Eggroll does nice work.
Well for my work needs I require NVIDIA graphics cards and very high end multi channel audio cards and some other bits and bops. I can dream I can swap one day though.
Oh yeah don’t get me wrong, super not a fan of avid and protools whole thing, but hands are part tired unfortunately :( I am glad I ditched avid stuff for video work many years ago at least, though really am not sure Adobe is the better place to be rofl. One day I would love to have a fully working machine you can use in industry that is entirely Linux!!
I e had the opposite experience with my 7800x3D. With windows, my Soundblaster card’s drivers won’t install because they will cause an “unstable overclock” while it works on the Nobara installation.
Sure, once I decide on a more permanent distro. Manjaro was ok but I keep hearing bad things and it was a gaming partition, not an all purpose partition. I’m sure lurking in Linux communities will give me some ideas, though.
Yeah, I got my samba Share setup on my temporary NAS tonight. But after I transfer my files, I’m torn what try as permanent. Been using KDE Neon on my laptop, but it does need to update every boot it seems.
I used Kubuntu on my workstation and liked it. I use ubuntu at work for all my Linux needs there. I’m also really tempted to just make it a proxmox server and turn it into a VM box essentially. Which would make the experience of trying new things or switching back to windows for that inevitable game that won’t work on Linux fairly seamless. But I could also give freebsd another go too, which doesn’t seem like a terrible idea
I could ramble on, but I think I’ll leave it at the realization I really like Debian based distros. If you feel like it let me know what you decide!
The thing that bugs me the most about Settings is the amount of wasted white space on every page. You have to do so much scrolling and clicking through tabs just to find various options. By comparison the dialogue boxes of the Control Panel apps are compact and concise. Every time I have to scroll down for something in Settings, I wonder why there’s so much empty space padding around everything.
You’d think a multi billion dollar corporation could afford a decent UI designer or two.
While My go to is control panel if they fully committed to settings in win 8 I wouldn’t give a fuck. I don’t care where my settings live as long as it’s all in 1 place
Pity I have shifted enough away from win thar I only need it for a single program and could no longer care