this post was submitted on 23 Aug 2024
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[–] [email protected] 61 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (6 children)

It'd be fine if 1) everything from Control Panel is implemented and properly working and 2) everything stays consistent (because otherwise, as other folks have mentioned, at one point written tutorials even with screenshots quickly become obsolete). I don't see this happening any time soon.

Maybe instead of that they can start encouraging people to use the command line, although even fewer settings are reachable though there.

[–] [email protected] 36 points 3 months ago (3 children)

Their settings pages are the worst; full of white space, finding what they considered "advanced" settings is usually a pain in the ass, and everything is dumbed down to a mind-numbing extent.

I've hated Settings pages with a passion since they were introduced, and always typed the full .msc I was looking for.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 3 months ago (1 children)

I really hate that you can only open one settings page at a time. There is no justification to making you lose your place you’re working on just because you want to adjust another minor setting. With the old interface I can e.g. have network and sound settings open at the same time and I don’t know why they took that away.

[–] fuzzzerd 2 points 3 months ago

I have been able to live with everything else, but this is the one that kills me every time.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 3 months ago

the loss of info density in favor of making everything fingerable has been one of the worst things to happen to anyone slightly inclined at managing systems. i hate trying to manage things in a touch based UI. so much fucking scrolling and wasted space. it does look nice , but fuck is it a productivity killer.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

I also dislike the design layout. Eg. I much prefer the control panel version of Disk Management than the settings purely from an aesthetics stand point. Each disk and their partitions are just easier to see and differentiate from others.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (2 children)

Maybe instead of that they can start encouraging people to use the command line

LOL, there's no more common phobia among Windows users than the CLI. EVERY Linux discussion "BUT ZOMG CLI COMMANDS!" (when realistically a novice user can avoid them most of the time, and they absolutely are more efficient for helping someone via lemmy post or similar than figuring out what version of what DE they have and trying to tell them the 12 clicks they need to do for the same task)

[–] curry 18 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

No joke. Opening a command line from windows by itself is considered hacking by many. Even toggling dark mode in websites triggers that fear.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 3 months ago

"OMG. Are you a hacker?"

"...I'm just using Powershell."

[–] [email protected] 12 points 3 months ago (1 children)

between the powershell push, wsl, and sudo for windows they are pushing command line usage for advanced users though

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

I can't argue with that, but I still take exception to the idea that only advanced users should be willing/able/unafraid to use the CLI. (not that I'm suggesting that you personally are pushing that viewpoint)

When you click a button, you have to read and interpret the label on that button, then hope the person who programmed it actually did program it to do what it is labeled to suggest, and sometimes even well meaning devs make this ambiguous. Plus, you have to FIND the button, which is kinda the subject of many of the discussions here in this very thread.

You go learn what ls does one time, and now you know how to list the contents of a directory. Spend two minutes each learning ps aux and grep, and now you know how to find process info for firefox (or whatever), plus you don't need to know more than the very most basic things about grep to use it to search a text or conf file for a particular string. Or learn the ffmpeg command that you use most often for recursively processing a directory full of video files, and now you don't spend 20 minutes mucking around with handbrake or whatever when prepping files to toss onto your Kodi box (I'm just pulling that one out of my butt). Hell, yt-dlp for downloading videos from just about anywhere is better than any gui tool I ever used.

I think it's totally valid for people to prefer a gui, but I find it a little foolish that so many people just seem to intentionally shut off their brain when presented with a CLI - it's different than clicking buttons, and it's not always superior, but it should absolutely not be the bogeyman that many treat it as. You can probably learn less than ten commands to just a minimal level of proficiency and get a LOT done.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 3 months ago

I guarantee you they've only ported over about half of the Control Panel's features. The common stuff, sure. The rest...

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago

Talking about consistency, technically Windows still has UI elements from 3.1 era at Atleast couple of obscure places.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago

Gotta brush up on the ol' powershell