this post was submitted on 25 Mar 2025
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Settings is the bloat. Control Panel reigns supreme.
Half the shit I actually want I just run directly these days, rather than nosing through either.
Just to name a few.
Settings is more accessible to casual users.
Fuck. Casual. Users.
Edit: To be clear "make it easier for casual users" is some MBA bullshit. The casual user adds nothing to technology - when those retards get involved, things enshitify because they let it happen.
Causal users shouldn't be fucking around in settings since I can attest with factual data that 0% of casual users actually know what the fuck they are doing.
So delete Settings and only allow Control Panel
Except when the setting they need isn't in Settings. Then it's a wild goose chase.
In fact, it's often a wild goose chase even if it is in Settings, because the question then is where did Microsoft decide to hide it in this most recent update?
The thing everyone misses which was Control Panel's greatest strength, however, was that vendors could add their own .cpl extensions to it. So settings for your specific hardware could go there. (Yes, this was abused by-and-large by some vendors just like the system tray, but that's not the point.) Literally all of your settings and configuration stuff could go in one place. Even if a user did not know exactly where, at least they had a consistent place to start looking.
That all ended with Windows 2000/XP and got worse with 8/10/11.
Now we have this:
"I want to change the behavior of Windows feature X."
Spin the wheel and guess!
Etc.
Control panel may have been clunky, especially for frequently accessed settings, but at least it was unified.
Also, when you use the built in windows search to search for an installed program, except it doesn't find it, but gives you web results instead. Microsoft needs to take a seriously massive step back and realise how much they've fucked up this basic stuff.
I'm positive that's deliberate, though, because they're desperate to drive traffic to Bing by any means necessary.
Until they call me because the setting they need isn't in settings....
In that case, they wouldn’t have found it in Control Panel anyways.
Otherwise, they would have opened Control Panel.
They better not touch my damn control panel. I'll fight a microsoft systems engineer. They can be added to the list.