Technology

In favor of what? I still have to use control panel because some things are seemingly unreachable by the "settings" menus.

honestly I still cant figure out how to configure a network interface properly without using the old control panel.

Great. So managing printers, network settings and quickly comparing settings from two places becomes a weird game of screenshots and guessing.

Remote support workers of the world collectively shake their fist in despair.

No way on this planet I will be able to explain the new UI to your average office worker.

I have friends who work in IT and would probably slam their head against the wall if they had to deal with Control Panel being removed.

Are Microsoft deliberately trying to make the fabled Year of the Linux Desktop finally become a reality? Because I feel like we're two or three more dumbfuck business moves away from this...

Control panel largely accrued content - it is generally navigated via left and right click which works great and is stable. Things don't vanish.

Settings, on the other hand, is left click only navigation mostly. It also changed constantly (usually for the worst) - tutorials written 2 years ago are no longer valid because access to that setting was removed. This makes using settings to fix things a real nightmare.

RIP. It’s been coming for a while, and Control Panel will likely be on hospice for a few more years, but it will be a sad day when control panel is gone.

It'd be fine if 1) everything from Control Panel is implemented and properly working and 2) everything stays consistent (because otherwise, as other folks have mentioned, at one point written tutorials even with screenshots quickly become obsolete). I don't see this happening any time soon.

Maybe instead of that they can start encouraging people to use the command line, although even fewer settings are reachable though there.

Windows "god mode": https://www.howtogeek.com/402458/enable-god-mode-in-windows-10/

What is god mode?

it's simply a special folder you can enable that exposes most of Windows' admin, management, settings, and Control Panel tools in a single, easy-to-scroll-through interface

It's very easy to set this up, and it also works in Windows 11. Even if Microsoft removes access to the normal Control Panel, I seriously doubt this will be taken out.

This is never going to happen fully, because there is a ton of software and also device drivers that hook into the OG Control Panel system and install their own .cpl's there, which are required for that hardware/software to work. The system to support those is going to have to remain in place, otherwise Microsoft is going to have a lot of very angry corporate customers and hardware vendors up their noses in short order.

In fact, this is most likely the exact reason the Control Panel still exists behind the scenes the way it does today in Win10 and Win11. They'll probably go to ever-greater lengths to hide it from home users, but I'd doubt they can actually remove it completely at this point.

In fact, from TFA:

Tip: while the Control Panel still exists for compatibility reasons and to provide access to some settings that have not yet migrated, you're encouraged to use the Settings app, whenever possible.

So in six months, someone will have written a third-party Windows Control Panel.

If they actually move all the settings over to the "new" settings app (it's actually 12 years old now): good.

It's an absolute joke that there are multiple settings apps in windows, with design inconsistency across them, and it being a crapshoot whether the screen you look at will support dark mode or not (can you tell I'm tired of being blinded on evenings by unexpected white windows? Lol).

If they don't move all the settings over: bad.

Yeah they're usually niche, but some of those options are needed!

Since this is Microsoft we're talking about, it's probably going to be the latter, unfortunately. "Oh you want to adjust some network settings? That's not in our settings app, and we've retired the control panel – you actually need to open Run and type ncpa.cpl"

This doesn't say they're removing it, just deprecating it. I thought it had been deprecated for ages

That's okay because Windows will be gone entirely from my PC in a month.

Fine. Next desktop build is linux.

Didn't they learn that taking away what people grew up with for more than two decades already will result in outraged customers? (Windows 8 - start menu removed and replaced by start screen)

I work on an application that went through multiple iterations of UIs. Each superseded the previous one and a new admin UI was built into them. The oldest one was using Flash.

Occasionally I still have to drill down through four layers of "open legacy UI here" to get to some obscure, long forgotten setting. Manipulating shit with half-working elements in a VM running a flash-capable browser. Day to day I just go back one iteration though, because the admin UI has everything I need there. Unlike the latest iteration.

Some day we play on killing off the flash UI version completely. We already have planned workarounds in place to manipulate those obscure settings through endpoint calls. Won't be missed. But I'd miss the second to last admin UI that has everything where I need greatly.

This is what ms is killing off now. A good UI in windows where you can find everything. And all it'd have taken to make it better is give it a robust search functionality. No one cares about going back and forth in convoluted loops between sleek UI pages. People that care to manage stuff in windows at depth will be forced into shallow shit.

If I hadn't already migrated to Linux after the insider crapshow, this probably would have forced me off.

The en-metro-ification continues.

I mean, sticking with a paradigm that existed at least since windows 3.11 (my first version of windows) isn't exactly ideal, entire software stacks are built around it existing.

It's really too bad that Microsoft abandoned Windows Phone, because that is where this UI makes sense. But shoehorning the mistake of windows 8 into everything seems like doubling down on failure.

It would be nice if a competitor entered the space where usability is the goal and be an open source solution.

My god, the amount of legacy crap in Windows.

They ought to just start over at some point.