No, you’re on the money here. 7 at least had a consistent UI. It wasn’t super pretty if we’re all being honest with ourselves (the control panel is an ugly and clunky way of doing things compared to KDE’s settings menu, for example), but it was all very functional, fairly well organized, and generally there was one setting for everything, in one place. And to be fair, KDE and Gnome were a lot clunker back then too.
The problems started with 8, because they had the idea to rework this old, ugly UI, but completely half-assed it, so rather than totally replacing every old UI element they just built new ones and ran them in parallel with the old ones, and any settings that didn’t seem super important or useful to most people got ignored because hey, it’s still in the old UI, people can just go there. And this problem has persisted right through into 11, albeit with gradual improvements.
My guess is, they had to run it in parallel. So many things relied on the old UI, not to mention run/cmd commands (printui, netplwiz to name a few), that simply just putting modern replacements for those things would have broken every single printer share, user credentials manager, etc., there is out there. So, they decided to run them in parallel. Smart choice if you ask me, since they own most of the desktop market share, if they decided to make a 180 turn on this, that would have cut a significant portion of their user market share… not to mention companies that heavily rely on MS products being pissed AF.
No, you’re on the money here. 7 at least had a consistent UI. It wasn’t super pretty if we’re all being honest with ourselves (the control panel is an ugly and clunky way of doing things compared to KDE’s settings menu, for example), but it was all very functional, fairly well organized, and generally there was one setting for everything, in one place. And to be fair, KDE and Gnome were a lot clunker back then too.
The problems started with 8, because they had the idea to rework this old, ugly UI, but completely half-assed it, so rather than totally replacing every old UI element they just built new ones and ran them in parallel with the old ones, and any settings that didn’t seem super important or useful to most people got ignored because hey, it’s still in the old UI, people can just go there. And this problem has persisted right through into 11, albeit with gradual improvements.
My guess is, they had to run it in parallel. So many things relied on the old UI, not to mention run/cmd commands (
printui,netplwizto name a few), that simply just putting modern replacements for those things would have broken every single printer share, user credentials manager, etc., there is out there. So, they decided to run them in parallel. Smart choice if you ask me, since they own most of the desktop market share, if they decided to make a 180 turn on this, that would have cut a significant portion of their user market share… not to mention companies that heavily rely on MS products being pissed AF.