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.

If Microsoft had actually moved all the settings over to the "new" settings app (it's 12 years old, btw), I'd be supportive of this.

It's a joke that windows has 2 settings apps, and searching for specific settings in the start menu will take you to either, or to both.

But as we all know, Microsoft won't do this properly. They'll likely just continue with their 75% finished settings app while hiding the control panel, and if you need something not in the settings app you'll have to open some old menu using a run command or some other terrible convoluted step that makes you feel like you're running a half-baked Linux distro from 2003.

MacOS, Android, iOS, Linux distros don't have this issue. Fucking TempleOS doesn't have this issue. Microsoft is a $3.2 trillion company!

The absolute lack of effort they put into Windows is pathetic. They're a shining example of why monopolies should not be allowed to happen.

the thing that most grinds my gears is that there are settings that appear in both control panels and settings, appear to be changeable in both, but only one or the other actually changes anything.
I hate the settings app so much that I've just learned the powershell commands for setting up printers and changing NIC settings. Honestly it wouldn't be as bad if a. It didn't take forever to load on occasion and b. I could have two settings windows open at once.
It's so hard to find settings there that jumping between network center and add device is not intuitive. If they remove control panel from servers too I might quite my msp job and go work at a grocery store.
Does Linux have good support for VR yet? Specifically my HP Reverb g2 that seems to be reliant on windows mixed reality...
- I've never tried VR on any OS, but from what I've heard it's hit and miss on Linux right now - certainly not as good as Windows at the moment.
  I know that KDE has a lot of stuff for VR (unsurprising given Valve is pushing for it), and Gnome has just merged a lot of the same, so if you give it a spin I'd recommend an up-to-date distro (say Fedora or OpenSUSE Tumbleweed) with either KDE or Gnome.
  I imagine that when Valve releases their new headset, progress will accelerate, but that's just a guess
- I have the same headset, and as of a few weeks ago when I last checked, there is not complete support. I think the display works mostly, but the controllers don't so it might depend on what you are doing.
- Just a curious question - Is there any VR sets that work with Linux Distros? I'm not much of a gamer to need or want one. Just want to learn for learning's sake.

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 it doesn't take years to load, specially on older PCs
- 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.
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.
This. Settings does not have full audio devices information and settings.

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.
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.
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
- Have you used Settings?
- This isn't removal, is deprecation.
- 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.

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
- Yeah I see this as more of a "Printers are an antiquated technology that hasn't changed much in the last 30+ years" problem.
- 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.

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.

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.

Most people don't care about this, and I wish I didn't, but for whatever reason my brain just hates inconsistency like this, and Windows is the absolute worst for it. It makes me hate using my computer. I'm truly jealous of the people who are completely unfazed by ugly/inconsistent UX, I wish it was a trait I had.
Context menus like this, UI elements from many different windows versions, 5+ UX toolkits in use at any given time, inconsistent padding, inconsistent fonts, inconsistent keyboard shortcuts within MS apps, dark mode preference being listened to for one app and ignored in another.
I hate Apple, have never owned any of their products and likely never will, but they'd be embarrassed if they had a UX this sloppy and inconsistent. They'd straight up not release it, because for all their faults, they do actually value UX consistency.
Linux DEs are far more visually cohesive than Windows (especially the likes of Gnome and ElementaryOS), even KDE which was/is frequently mocked for being a bit ugly and inconsistent has improved leaps and bounds recently and is now far more consistent than Windows. And they're all working on a combined budget that's probably less than 1% of Windows' development budget. Wtf are Microsoft doing??
- I like the cut of your jib.
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 know people in IT who only use control panel. This will piss people off.

Hot take but anyone who refuses to rethink how things work during their lifetime causes changes to happen at the pace of 1 change per generation.
Of course, in this case, the new thing really is inferior.
- I have no problem with change. But I do have a problem with Microsoft's lack of QC or proper design methodology.
- I mean I use windows and Linux for home and work. I'm happy with a changing ecosystem. The control panel is, often, the best tool to get shit done on windows.
Ew. They should expand their skill set to using terminal/powershell.
I'm not knocking on GUIs but I will call out "IT professionals" who ONLY know how to use GUIs.
- To be fair powershell is more recent and windows has always used the control panel for most configuration, they are kind of rug pulling everyone who learned to use it and there arent clear terminal alternatives, for instance, how do I calibrate a game controller's axis with the terminal?
- Any time on Linux, but the windows shells are unusable. And configuration databases are much more convoluted things on windows than text files
- If you want Windows without a GUI, you should be using MS-DOS. The whole point of Windows is that it has a GUI.

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

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.

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 be real...Microsoft finally depreciated Windows with Windows 11.

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

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.

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.

no. fucking. way.

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!

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 recently found the YT channel Michael MJD, and it has made me realize how fun and cool Microsoft was in the XP and 7 eras.

It was just before the cloud ruined everything and it was before the curse of the flat UI design.

It was a more fun time.

Windows 7 is the prettiest Windows ever made, with XP running Royale theme a close second.

They were the best Windows versions, but Microsoft was not cool. They were still monopolistic and anti-competitive as fuck. They still actively killed smaller companies, they still bribed politicians, etc.
- I will grant you that I may be reflecting my oppinion on XP and 7 on Microsoft as a whole.
Microsoft mjght have been better than thwy are now then, but they were NEVER fun and cool. Dont be gaslit.
- Oh fuck off, you don't get to decide my oppinions.
- Spot the self-congratulary Linux user

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.

That's fine, I can't imagine using another version of Windows once 10 LTSC hits EoL.

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?

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 ^^^

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.

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.

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

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.

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

One word. “devman”

And just like that . . . Windows deleted itself

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

I feel like I'm losing control