Microsoft formally deprecates the 39-year-old Windows Control Panel

On brand. Settings is like control panel but dumber.

I love how in settings all the different miuse options are spread out in different places!
Want to change mouse speed, cursor size, and color? We are going on an adventure!
- 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.
- I bet AI would be helpful here!!
The only benefit is more tightly integrated Powershell commands for some of them... but even that is still lacking in a lot of areas.

Oh no. They really want me swapping to Linux full time with this shit, ugh.

What's stopping you?
Just get it over with.
- The setup, mostly. I know I can VM my mandatory work programs, at least. Dual boot has been too frustrating since Windows won't play ball.
- 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.
THIS was your tipping point. control panel removal.
LMAO
- 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.
- This isn't removal, is deprecation.
Do it. I will too. I'll do a QEMU Vm for my windows needs. I'm done with their behavior.
- 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.

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.

UI designers have had a war on information density for a loooooong time.
- UI designers are paid off by big hand surgeon to make me scroll more
They used to have people who knew what they were doing: https://socket3.wordpress.com/2018/02/03/designing-windows-95s-user-interface/
Now their UI team seems to just be two guys shitting in a bucket (shamelessly stealing that expression from KiraTV).
- Thanks for sharing that post, it was super interesting.
  I wish I could see behind the scenes in the Windows UI discussions, to see how we get to what we have today
They could, but as with Google, the middle managers have to justify their existence somehow.

Just 3 days ago I had to use the control panel to access the settings I needed to get my parents' printer to work right. Even tried to use the regular settings menu for maybe 10 minutes before remembering how to access the settings I needed. Here's hoping my parents never run into printer issues again (lol).

FUCK YOU, MICROSOFT!

Spoiler: they will, because fucking printers
- In fact, they are going to remove third-party printer drivers and replace them with universal drivers. Link
I recently added a printer to my PC. Having to launch that antique spooler window from like Windows 3.1 to print is a bit hilarious
I had to do this today on my wife’s laptop. The settings menu just wouldn’t do it. It just sat there for a thousand years.

I'm all for an improved UX but the settings app is not an improved UX, it's taking many different ways to manage windows features and throwing them into arbitrary categories that are constantly getting shifted around.

How about instead just improving some other Windows control features? Let me filter by name in services.msc and devmgmt.msc. Let me search in gpedit.msc.

I will say I do appreciate that they've finally made those features work under HiDPI without looking like a blurry pixelated mess. Only took 14 years since the first mass market HiDPI display was released, and 23 years since the first 4k monitor

They should just copy the Plasma System Settings app.
- It really is about the best settings app I've ever used, especially where it highlights the settings that have been changed from defaults
Preach. Make an actual improved control panel, settings is garbage. It's not just scattering things around it really doesn't include a ton of necessary settings.
- Right, the amount of settings you can't actually change in settings and instead open up a legacy UI modal to change a specific thing is a demonstration that it's very much lipstick on a pig rather than a core overhaul. There's so much baggage in keeping Windows backwards compatible for enterprise that I'm not really sure they can get to a point of having a new control panel where everything is organized into a better UI without cutting some of that baggage and doing major refactors, which will break compatibility, and they make the most money from widespread enterprise licenses across massive private and public organizations, not from windows home licenses included with new computers
The constantly shifting shit around in Settings makes online tutorials for fucking anything useless.

That's the kind of user-friendliness that Linux just can't compete with.

I don’t think this is a real issue in the age of bespoke design for applications. Only a minority of then use the OS widgets for their interface. You can argue that this is a bad thing, but then the context menus are just a tiny portion of the entire issue.
- As annoying as it is, I'd rather have visually inconsistent elements rather than broken applications. There's something to be said for backwards compatibility.
I don't get it

Microsoft is so ridiculously out of touch with its users demands.

I think it's more that they're indifferent to it's users all together.
- Microsoft:

I’m not sure what to say. Settings just doesn’t let you get anything done. Are they going to add all the missing functionality to settings before getting rid of control panel? We all know the answer.

If my company didn’t have a windows mandate I would fully abandon it at this point. What a joke.

Yup. I have 1 app that requires window. That's all that's keeping me. That one app. And we're migrating away from it towards a webif, so it's only a matter of time.
I'm curious about how this impacts the buttons in the settings app that just open the appropriate control panel applet. Like "additional sound settings" for example.

Muahaha now I can prepare for my final form: crotchety old man complaining about how they killed off the control panel.

Become boomer

Nice, take away the only tool that sometimes fixes what your engineers destroyed

Just yesterday I wanted to disable sound devices. The button in the settings app even says „turn devices on/off“, but once inside the menu, there is no option to enable or disable sound devices.

Had to use the control panel again.

Mmsys.cpl is the only way for me

Let's wait for CEOs to learn about the mess of Program Files\Program Files (x86), and how the user directory is filled with links replacing deprecated folders making it unusable. Windows is more of the inverted Babylon tower of hell than a consistent and complete vision of a product, one layer is built on top of another like a patchwork of a clinically insane. That's with all their $billions, millions of workhours and a market monopoly.

That's mostly because of backwards compatibility, and it's a blessing imo.
- Or a forward compatibility, since they weren't obliged to create these new paths, and they did, thus creating a problem for themselves.

I haven't personally used windows for a long while. I get to fix my wife's stupid printer, scanner Adobe Acrobat. That's it. I mean this is great! It means that we can just go on with our lives and automatically not be windows savvy anymore! So many benefits! I can just tell all my tech beneficiaries to take a hike or go Linux because I don't know how to fix their dumbass windows! This is going to be great!

I've been doing that for years. I genuinely do not know how to fix Windows anymore. Took a while for my family and friends to accept since I "work with computers" but now they don't automatically come to me when Windows breaks.
- Oh this is good to know that the strategy works because that's what I'm planning to do.

They just have to rename, move, and otherwise obfuscate shit. Always in the general direction of worse.

Can't wait for windows deprecating windows at this point

I've considered windows to be deprecated for over a decade.
- I think they meant having actual window UI elements.
  Everything fullscreen! Or force-tiled! Or else!

no. fucking. way.

Good god, this is sad to witness. As long as I've been using windows, they've added duplicates of every single thing, but presented differently, each version being slightly more incapable in slightly different ways. How can a piece of software be so utterly lacking in design and forethought is beyond me, for real.

Classic Microsoft move to implement something new, then not let go of the old thing and run them jankily side by side. Settings / Control panel is a prime example.

And at work its janky crossovers between Active Directory and Azure/Intune/Entra/other dumb names.

This clearly calls for Windows God Mode.

Why do they hate their customers so much?

I thought it said "decapitates" at first and I lol'd

Next will be NT. I think they will put their thing above a Linux somewhere in the next future.

I gather that the nt kernel isn't inherently bad, rather that the aging win32 subsystem is the problem.

Is this just for 11, or are they going to ruin 10 some more with this change too?
I'm not seeing it mentioned in the article.

Well, 10 is going away in about a year anyway, isn't it. I don't think they really care about 10 anymore.
- I'm staying on 10 until it really doesn't work, and then moving entirely to Linux. I already don't use windows much and I'm not missing most of it.
- It's just support that's going away, not the OS.

This would bother me more if I hadn't switched to Linux full time 5y ago. Microsoft is gonna Microsoft I guess.

Every one of these Microsoft controversies since I ditched them has just validated my decision.

You will have to take ncpa.cpl from my cold dead hands

Changing IP assignment in the modern settings app is straight up annoying

This ^^^

And just like that the last vestiges of my computing childhood are gone. I'm gonna go sadly play Oregon Trail on an emulator now.

Good luck finding the settings to allow unregistered exes without the control panel
- Could always just use Linux.
- How would you do that on Windows control panel?

That's fine when you want a setting that exists in the settings app. Let me know if you find a place to adjust your audio device speaker configuration, or toggle live monitoring of an audio input.
- Or set up your IrDA driver for a dongle that it does not really recognize.
  Settings was utterly useless for this. Long live the control panel!
- It's not really fine, though. It's much more sparse on information, and the animations slow you down because buttons are not clickable until the animation ended. And then there's when the menu gets populated in chunks through a few seconds, don't even try to click the button because it will jump away and you'll click something else. No, this is not on an old machine: Ryzen system with SSD.

At least windows god mode still available although you need a little bit trick to summon it

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

No big deal to me. I use search in control panel to find what I need. Do the same for Settings. Or just open mmc and load the appropriate item.

I find it funny they've been trying to kill the Control Panel for 12 years now and still haven't been able to do it. Microsoft, here's an idea you can have for free: Put an "Other" section in the Settings app that opens the Control Panel inside the app, QED.

I feel like I'm losing control

Nice screenshot, nobody will recognize by this what did they remove

Settings itself has been around in one form or another since at least Win95. 29 years...

One word. “devman”

And just like that . . . Windows deleted itself