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Comment by tgv | Hacker News Reader

You write it as a joke, but I recently got myself a PC with Win11Pro. First glance: brand new UI. Until you open some specific settings, or choose "more options" from a context menu, then it's Windows 10. Then you need to tweak something else, and it's suddenly it's Windows XP. And when you go to something in the device/hardware area, you're confronted with a dialog that hasn't changed since NT.

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The thing that blows my mind is how settings are just straight up duplicated. Like monitor sleep settings is in the Windows 10 style display preference panel. But it’s ALSO in a weird Windows Vista looking preferences window too. You have to use the second one to switch the “profile” as well.

It’s some serious garbage.

I watched a video of somebody removing Program Files and related folders until the system stop working. At some point Win11 reverted itself into Win10

Maybe this one: https://youtube.com/watch?v=BVIN_PJu2rs

Discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33954176

And, fun fact, these old(er) dialogs are still often better/easier to understand than the new ones. This may be partially nostalgia speaking but I really dislike the new settings and would like to have kept Windows 7 style control panel with some improvements (e.g. resizable, layout managed dialogs). But it is what it is, on the Mac side it also started going downhill after catalina.

The people who remember how the low-level stuff works are long gone. Through a combination of received wisdom and good old-fashioned operant conditioning, the devs who are left don't dare touch any of it. It's third-rail code.

They've slowly been replacing these legacy interfaces with the modern UI. It seems to have accelerated under Windows 11 but it's been ongoing since Windows 8.

Just wait until they add Android UI as well!

Why reskin, redesign or rewrite something that has been stable and just fine for 10-15 years? Especially if you only access it once in a blue moon

Because it's not like you go to the Control Panel, and when you go to "devices" that brings up an old UI. Instead you have a number of "control panels" that bring up confusingly overlapping mix of old and new UIs.

The more option menu is just a joke, they really couldn't bother to just fully migrate it?

For all its failures, the linux desktop has one of the best if not the best design consistency out there

Meanwhile, KDE Plasma is getting better with each version.

Yeah, Windows would be 100% better if they just picked one UI design approach and actually made everything work through it.

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