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

Every single interaction with post-Windows 7 configuration / settings leaves me very frustrated. Some settings have new UIs, some don’t, often there are several generations of UIs for the same group of settings. Add to that minor revisions of the UI that happen as part of software updates. Finally, hardware vendors often have their own apps, various “Ninja Dragon Sci-fi Anime Nuclear Power Plant Control Centers” from graphic card vendors and some random sys-tray crap for your webcam and touchpad.

I have no idea why things turned out this way, and I remember how with every other major OS release Microsoft promises a brand new rewrite, and yet if you dig deep enough you probably can find some UI from Win3.1 era.

But... don't the control panel windows have more functionality (and usability) in practice?

I still go to "Sounds" even on Windows 10/11 because it's easier to read and seems to have more functionality.

Especially in the networking section, there's tons of functionality you can only access via the good old Control Panel applets.

In the Settings app there's only a "DHCP or no DHCP" option. No choice about DNS server info or DNS suffixes, no way to edit adapter settings (jumbo frames etc) and so on.

Another example, regional settings, the Settings app only allows for some bare-bones customization. Want to add additional clocks? Can't do that in Settings app.

So I truly hope this means they'll work on bringing that functionality over, rather than just removing the applets and let you sit there with the minimally functional Settings app.

I can imagine a series of events at MS like below (A pure imagination):

1. A new UX head is hired and looks for something that will make them look important.

2. Initiate a usability research across all the features in the Windows UI.

3. Make an internal announcement. "Our research shows that many users are scared of changing settings in Control Panel. They are afraid of breaking the system by changing anything there. We will create a new UX for changing settings in a simple, intuitive, and innovative way."

4. They hire many UX researchers, visual designers, UI prototypers, and of course many middle managers.

5. A year later, another announcement. "We now have a complete understanding of how we can create a simple, intuitive, and innovative user experience. Now our engineering team will implement this in upcoming years."

6. They hire many product managers, UI engineers, program managers, QA team, and of course many middle managers.

7. Two years later, another announcement. "We are launching the new innovative UX that replaces Control Panel".

8. Get a lot of internal feedback. "The new UI doesn't let me change X or Y setting", "The new UI is too slow", "Too much whitespace in the new UI", etc. They are all ignored as "working as intended". They say "X and Y settings are used by very few users. Use the old UI for those settings."

9. Several years later, "We don't have enough engineering resources to maintain two different apps. Let's kill Control Panel."

All this engineering effort for what? The new settings stuff is materially worse than the old stuff.

Part of me is just amazed at how slow large corps are - what does everyone do??

In so many areas the new stuff is not features complete or equivalent after years and years. And the usability is worse. And comically, despite going to a "modern" solution - the whole things runs SLOWER by far than classic settings which was near instant.

So both they why for the change and the seeming insanely slow pace of getting the old working (again) on the new and improved are both questions I think.

Sounds, printers, mouse, networking, user management and more - I feel like I'm always trying to fight my way back to harder to find classic control panels after trying to do stuff with the improved versions.

For larger installs you used to be able to loin to audit mode, customize a profile and make it the default for new users. That was super easy for even non-IT folks to do to get a baseline setup that seemed to cover almost all settings. Now that's gotten "improved" into garbage as well.

Instead we are getting UWP apps (mostly garbage) that can be hard to uninstall if provisioned in weird ways to a user.

They should first fix their search. The new settings are overwhelming and I end up having so many clicks when I need something like adding Hyper-V or add a Bluetooth device.

Then, there’s the Windows search. If you ever tried using Settings and search. Most of the time you end up getting Edge opened with an outdated link or unhelpful Bing search.

I just hope they won’t axe it until figuring out how they make decent settings.

This is because a particular support page has "The Control Panel is in the process of being deprecated in favor of the Settings app, which offers a more modern and streamlined experience.". Crazy how that somehow has spawned endless articles from tech "news" sites. But it's hardly news, and saying they've 'officially deprecated' is misleading. Fact is The Control Panel has been in the 'process of being deprecated' since Windows 8.

Setting file associations is the worst UX regression in the W11 Settings app.

For example, say I want to set Irfanview to be my default application to view images. I need to go through every file type that Irfanview can open, then select Irfanview. I can't tell Windows just to use Irfanview for all the formats that it can handle.

In the W7 Control Panel, this was a single click.

They are really alienating their user base. Someone I know had their work PC moved to Windows 11, she has been swearing like a drunken sailor since about not being able to find things.

She only cares about Excel a and email, but have been having a very hard time with 11. Once people finds out Linux User Experience with KDE does not change that much, people may start moving.

Just use God Mode: https://www.tomsguide.com/how-to/how-to-enable-god-mode-in-w...

Google (rightly) catches a lot of grief for having multiple overlapping products (e.g. Chat), but Microsoft should be equally shamed for having such a hodge-podge of overlapping configuration interfaces in their own OS. In Windows 11, there's really no telling if the setting your're looking for will be in one of the newer/flat interfaces or a classic Windows GUI window.

Good. Should have happened earlier. The old one wasn’t perfect in any way. It could have been modernized slowly over the years instead of adding a new incomplete one. The jump between them becomes very jarring. But the new one has felt like a toy presumably because the old one could handle those grown-up jobs.

But not having search(?), for example, makes the old one inferior no matter how familiar, dense, or “usable” the old one was.

If I type DNS in the settings search then I have to find the DNS settings, it’s that simple. If one version fails this test and one succeeds then the ranking is clear regardless of the rest of the UX.

But mostly I’m just going to come out and say it: I like redesigns and UX design is a feature in itself, while utilitarian design and familiarity is constantly overrated. Never moving anyone’s cheese is just catering to existing users at the expense of new ones.

> The Control Panel is in the process of being deprecated in favor of the Settings app, which offers a more modern and streamlined experience.

Is modern and streamlined what I want in a control panel replacement? When I think of modern and streamlined, I think about things that are so simple they aren't useful anymore, because they've replaced the complexity of control over a messy process with the intuitiveness of only having the illusion of control over a messy process.

It's actually amazing how old Windows is, and how many vestigial bits of ancient GUI versions are still a part of the OS. There's various levels of the UI: The newbie consumer level, the pro-user level, and the sys-admin level. The top is always changing, then the pro-user stuff gets updates after a while (always missing options which drives power users batshit), and then the low-level stuff which works fine and there's no reason to ever update just for looks.

That's where you run into truly ancient designs that haven't changed since the 90s. Event viewer, remote tools, driver install, etc.

And it's all still in there, using god knows what common .dlls from the dozen or so GUI toolkits that have come and gone. You have to admit, it shows an impressive longevity.

I just have to assume that Microsoft doesn't prioritize updating those elderly dialog boxes and tools because it's a thankless (and profit-less) task, which takes longer than expected and always filled with crazy edge cases and gotchas. They spent several years just updating the command line - granted, that's an important app which touched a lot of the OS, but it just shows the perils of messing with stuff that already works.

Seems they've already changed the text in response to feedback. The quote in this article says:

> The Control Panel is in the process of being deprecated in favor of the Settings app, which offers a more modern and streamlined experience.

Whereas the current text of the linked page on microsoft.com now says:

> Many of the settings in Control Panel are in the process of being migrated to the Settings app, which offers a more modern and streamlined experience.

Thankfully, Linux is getting much better for blind people. Orca has become much more stable, and accessibility is more than an extremely underground movement within desktop environments. Just a bit more, and we'll be ready.

Control panel has a good interface showing both the sections (large) as well as detailed items. If you know what you want you can go to the details directly.

Settings seems to be designed for touch screens that nobody uses. My laptop screen comfortably fits 70 lines of information. Settings gives me 17, less than a Commodore 64 which had 25 lines 40 years ago.

Any bets on how long before a 3rd party tool comes out that provides Control Panel like functionality... a bit like how the Windows 7-like Start Menu is still available for a quick download...

Ok, Microsoft is killing anything that was good about Windows. Don't want to be that guy, but the Settings app in KDE is the best in class and can configure almost every aspect of the desktop environment. Overall, Plasma Desktop is a better Windows experience than Windows itself now.

I'm a Linux user, but used to have a tech support gig for Windows (mostly Windows XP.) On a "loaner" Windows 10 machine, I wanted to add an admin user, and remove the existing user. I couldn't figure out how to do it through the GUI. So, I did it through CLI commands in Powershell. Maybe now I'll be doing the same for whatever I would have previously reached for in the Control Panel.

Though, my latest Android phone has been changing my behavior a bit. It seems every time I get a phone, the UI is way different from the last one. I don't bother trying to find anything in the UI anymore. Instead, the settings search has been working well enough in most cases.

I'm okay with some changes they're going to do as long as there will be proper alternatives. The new app is generally more confusing and less usable but I don't touch either that frequently so it is okay.

My concern is that they're not going to invest into the proper, fully functional alternatives, maybe intentionally. And I suspect they probably want to use this deprecation as an excuse to take the control away from users, similar to other mobile OS. The new setting app lacks many important functionalities and usually redirects to old control panels. And MS can simply remove old control panels without giving us alternatives, or significantly restricted "modern" ones with less controls.

I feel that mourning Control Panel is misplaced.

Microsoft would surely do better to build one UX for the normies and improve it rather than do a half baked job on two. The only mystery is why its taken so long. I can understand Microsoft wanting to phase the migration but its been 10+ years since Settings appeared.

If there's a request I would make to Microsoft it would be to expose all the settings, consistently, in a single programmatic way. Powershell would suit me just fine for instance. This idea that powerusers can just unleash on the registry, apart from being an incomplete way to control all the settings, is wild.

I'd be way happier if they formally deprecated Settings in favor of Control Panel.

MS stumbles upon any good design once per decade and has many times as much of failed experiments. Prefering old stuff is not necessarily nostalgia if you can't make anything good for this long despite trying.

Every other windows is a wholesale failed experiment and forcing it to stay alive is a terrible idea.

I have no idea why they kept Win8 start menu alive in Win10 instead of using the last good one, the one from Win7. They even had it in dev builds of Win10 and it was great.

A nice example of why even "small rewrites" seem to take decades.

For the last 15 years my first task on any new Windows version is to find the real control panel. Often I’m doing this to help someone with tech support on a version I’ve never actually used.

Good! I look forward to not being able to adjust a lot of settings and a slower UI.

Maybe it's time to finally try the Linux desktop. I mostly game hobby wise, and proton is in great shape nowadays.

Progress like the metro interface and win11 taskbar, why not!

Can you even 'Listen to this device' without going into the old Sound Control Panel? Pretty sure you can't.

I use this to pipe audio from other devices (e.g. game consoles) to a device (Roger pen) that transmits audio to my partner's hearing aid, because Windows doesn't have real tools for handling audio.

Oh, what about when something goes wrong with a wireless driver and the only fix is disabling and enabling the device, once again in the old control panel? This happens sometimes when you sleep a Surface Pro 5.

They've been trying to migrate to the new settings for 10+ years and somehow the result is that we have features that are exclusive to the new one and features that are exclusive to the old one.

I wonder if this will reduce the installation footprint of Windows or will rather increase it!

It was really funny to me last time I used Windows 11 – I was trying to find the devices system utility which is there from XP version, allowing you to see the connected peripherals, check their drivers, enable/disable them etc.

I spent good 15 minutes clicking on every button in this new settings app, until at the very bottom of it, the "About" section of the settings gives a faint blue link to open "devices".

What is this "About" even about? Does anyone know the logic behind this section's naming and why they put the link to devices dialog exactly there? MS insiders? Would be very interesting to know ;)

I guess those settings are still more advanced than in macOS. Nobody seems to complain about that one, and Apple's market share is rising and rising. People vote with their feet, and they aren't voting for Windows.

I'm guessing it's formally deprecated in the exact same way CMD.exe was deprecated in favor of PowerShell. I expect another 30 years before someone actually guts it from the OS.

I feel like I'm the odd one out where I like the new settings now, I haven't had to use the control panel in forever

there's lots of things I don't like about windows but it's not this

May finally have to give up windows for good. I mean I haven't done any real work on windows since mac went to osx .. it's basically just a game console at this point anyways.

Somehow I suspect this means fixing some problems will require finding out how to launch the old settings pages that are still there, but no longer easily accessible.

ChatGPT is so good at telling you how to configure something, that you should be able to tell windows what you want to do, and it should do it for you.

I was just thinking a couple of weeks ago how the new settings app is basically a bunch of text. Personally, I find it hard to navigate compared to colorful, differentiated icons.

The whole point of icons - to encapsulate meaning efficiently - seems to have disappeared from modern UI. Flat lists of text are fundamentally what we had in the early 90s before advanced CUIs and GUIs took over.

Wish Apple would deprecate the macOS System Settings app!

So clunky and slow in recent versions, it’s the only app that can make the latest M3 hardware feel underpowered and laggy. Yet still suffers from age-old problems like not being able to resize it’s window freely, which would at least help alleviate some of the UI weaknesses.

Older versions prior to recent redesign/“improvements” were actually better…

I wish windows fixed it's registry. Documented where different settings are in the registry. And also streamlined the registry to be a lot more intuitive.

UIs will build themselves around a simplified registry.

It's really mind boggling. Who at MSFT looks at the new settings app and thinks, yeah that's much better than the old one? Are they all high? Do they all have their own admin and never configure anything themselves? Do they even use Windows?

I guess one can still use plan B, the ReactOS component for Control Panel: https://github.com/katahiromz/RControlPanel

Microsoft should open source Windows 2000 and let the community patch it up to make it secure for 2024. That was the peak of UI. We've never been able to reach that summit since then, on any OS, on any device.

I much prefer the old Control Panel myself, but I think it's even worse to have two system programs for doing the same thing. Maybe now they will finally have to improve their modern Settings app.

>The Settings app was initially introduced in Windows 8 in 2012 as a touchscreen-friendly alternative for some of the Control Panel applets.

How many people actually use Windows with a touch screen?

What do you expect from Microsoft employees who use macs?

Good. That part of windows needs to be nuked from orbit.

Feels like every part of the UI was designed by a different team in isolation, glued together and shipped.

I often cant find the config i need , so I have to press "Win+R", and enter "control" and press enter to find it

There's no need to worry, I'm sure someone will create an open source equivalent (if there isn't one already).

I would pay for a modern win2kpro! But I’m tired of Microsoft nerfing windows that I only use for gaming

Every month or there is another reminder of how good a decision it was to switch to Linux on the desktop.

Gawd. Trying to find advanced sound settings the other day was awful. Microsoft is on a downward trajectory.

Noooooo. The only cool things left in Windows are Sandbox and WSL, but even WSL is a hot mess now.

I still use .cpl with run. appwiz.cpl and "control printers" are used daily by IT.

Probably going to be replaced by a set of obscure terminal commands, a la Linux.

Maybe they can finally allow us to open multiple settings windows at once?

If it keeps going this way, one day they will remove windows from Windows.

I'm so glad unix system configuration is just plain old text files.

Windows 2000 Professional was the best OS ever. Only downhill from there.

The amount of clicking around I have to do on the Settings window to get find where the hell things are is infuriating. Of course the search feature is just useless. I resort to Control Panel to just get most shit done. God forbid I need yo check a setting on another page and I forget how I even ended up on the page I needed.

Control Panel -> Add or remove programs -> Microsoft Windows -> (right click) -> Uninstall

Vista is here, again.

UX change can be frustrating but what the fuck are you guys doing that requires you to be in control panel all the time?

Please tell me there is a way to keep this, I can’t imagine losing the good ol’ control panel

Yep, now's the time to move to linux. Microsoft has gone bonkers and is going to inflict a lot of unnecessary pain and frustration on people before they correct course, if they ever do.

I swear, MS kills all the useful features in Windows.

For comparison, configuring a network interface using Control Panel is simple, straight forward and allows me to change all the settings I want. Trying to do the same thing using the Settings app is complex, it hides pretty nuch all of the advanced settings that you want to see or change. And on top of that, it doesn’t even show you how long that interface has been connected to the network and how much data was transferred both ways: incredible debugging info lost.

Oh, and the fact that you can’t tick which updates you want and which you don’t…

I’m pretty sure others have other gripes with the “streamlined experience”.

Everyone knows gpedit.msc is the real Control Panel. /s

I'm not surprised to see all the negative reactions. The old stuff was pure Win32 and thus very efficient in many ways. The new stuff is all UWP from what I understand (and UWP is itself supposedly deprecrated for several years now: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28932345), and much more abstracted and inefficient despite still being native code(?)

I still remember the first time I opened Settings and saw a loading screen, which spent over a second to load a UI that somehow looks even less complete than the one in Windows 1.0, on a system with several orders of magnitude faster CPU and more RAM:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29586970

The software industry has been on a quality decline for over a decade. This is just another datapoint in that sad trend.

And replaced it with utter bullshit.

I HATE the "Settings" crap. It's horrible. Fucking mess find anything. Half the functionality of the control panel applets are still not implemented. You essentially can't do more than one settings task at a time.

I seriously want to stab whoever thought this was a good idea on the face.