The Windows 10/11 "settings" are a hole pile of shit. It seems like Microsoft almost purposefully took the 10 things you would most often use, and nested them so deep that you cant even memorize how to find them anymore. So you get forced into using the god awful search, which returns results FROM THE GOD DAMN INTERNET. If I am in Windows setting, or hell even on just the normal Start Menu, I DON'T WANT any Windows search returning anything from the internet. Ever. If I want to search the internet, I will open a god damn web browser. FFS Microsoft, stop trying to turn yourself into some Frankenstein of iOS/Chromebook.
It's very obvious that pages for the Settings app are being written in some very restricting XML or HTML type markup and they're struggling to give any intuitive structure to settings. Everything is in a very basic single-column layout with virtually no graphics to visually guide your eye and combine or separate items. There doesn't even seem to be a generic table widget with sortable columns available.
I wouldn't call XAML restrictive. It's been used with WPF (their previous UI toolkit) with great effect: it can handle very complex interfaces just fine (look at Visual Studio, it's been using WPF since 2010).
> Think of the history of data access strategies to come out of Microsoft. ODBC, RDO, DAO, ADO, OLEDB, now ADO.NET – All New! Are these technological imperatives? The result of an incompetent design group that needs to reinvent data access every goddamn year? (That’s probably it, actually.) But the end result is just cover fire.
So what's happened to the start menu is cover fire. And the point is to create illusion of progress, progress your competitors feel they have to match(?)
I guess all those database access strategies cost little more than the effort to create them, because they were all thrown away in the end. But cover fire coming from the start menu has come at a cost. It's the Start Menu what finally made me decide Windows wasn't worth revisiting. Like any GUI oriented OS, you have to use the Start Menu repeatedly to get anything done. Which means it has to be fast. Yet sometimes it was taking seconds to respond.
I guess that's what happens to something that gets more and more features added to it to create cover fire. It gets slow, and so bloated that most people wont' use a fraction of what it provides. Yet even though they don't use them, the features still extract their cost.
> The Windows 10/11 "settings" are a hole pile of shit.
Hear, hear. Every time I want to do something with my networks, I have to guess which settings window I need. Win 10 settings window? Network and Sharing Center? Change adapter settings, aka Network Connections? Hyper-V Manager? Wrong! If you want to make your Hyper-V virtual Ethernet switch a private network, you have to bust out PowerShell!
Control Panel has been horrible since Win XP, and even then, you were better off with a third party settings app I'm forgetting the name of. The settings were in a tree structure, and hover text described every feature helpfully.
Poor discoverability. This means you have to know that the setting exists in the first place, and then remember its precise name. Type "static IP" into search, do you see a way to set static IP? I don't get any results at all.
ever tried to test microphone volume levels? every fucking time I have to search three different things before I can find it. I try "microphone", "audio", "volume", and its always the last one I try, and I can never remember for the next time.
Search is not a good UI, because you never get muscle memory with a search.
Speaking of terrible audio UX, windows constantly breaks hardware settings for multi-channel ADCs by disabling all but one channel (seems to be after most updates). Fixing it requires about a dozen clicks through many esoteric nested menus, including having to click hyperlink style text hidden on the far upper right side of a window away from the buttons. There are several audio settings pages in windows, and some of them offer no path to fixing the setting. If it's possible to reach the necessary page by searching in the start menu i have yet to find it. It's been like this for 2 years. It's astounding that working professionals would pay money for this garbage.
> I have to search three different things before I can find it
I've had the same problem; Microsoft has been changing the keyword that triggers the audio input/output control panel, but the official and unchanging (so far) name of the panel is "Change system sounds" and "sys" in start menu search returns that as the 1st or second result.
> Search is not a good UI, because you never get muscle memory with a search.
I feel like I do though... I often get in a pattern of just searching for the same few characters I know will bring up the right thing. Though Windows has a habit of deciding to change around the ordering on you.
The search sometimes just straight up does not work for me. Like 1-2 Minutes after a cold boot (I have fast startup turned off) it's completely unusable.
The Windows 10/11 "settings" are a hole pile of shit. It seems like Microsoft almost purposefully took the 10 things you would most often use, and nested them so deep that you cant even memorize how to find them anymore. So you get forced into using the god awful search, which returns results FROM THE GOD DAMN INTERNET. If I am in Windows setting, or hell even on just the normal Start Menu, I DON'T WANT any Windows search returning anything from the internet. Ever. If I want to search the internet, I will open a god damn web browser. FFS Microsoft, stop trying to turn yourself into some Frankenstein of iOS/Chromebook.
No one wants that.