Microsoft finally officially confirms it's killing Windows Control Panel sometime soon
After mulling over it for close to 14 years, it seems Microsoft is finally ready to kill off the Windows Control Panel soon. An official confirmation has been posted on its website.
In favor of what? I still have to use control panel because some things are seemingly unreachable by the "settings" menus.
Yeah. This sounds a lot like some PM type thinks they're gonna get rid of control panel, and they just don't know what all is actually in there.
And not to mention the custom control panel applets hanging around out there from who-knows-what vendors.
I don't think that the PM is wrong. They absolutely can get rid of the control panel. It's the user who will suffer ✌
And not to mention the custom control panel applets hanging around out there from who-knows-what vendors.
AMD FirePro and Catalyst users are going to probably stay on an older version of the OS, considering most of those users are going to be educational institutions, engineering workshops, makerspaces/hackerspaces etc.
Can't think of any other vendor products that integrated quite as much into the legacy control panel area
That's M$ intention, to hide some settings from users and lose control of Windows.
I wonder if you're talking about the windows 10 or windows 11 version of the settings app?
Yes. I have win 10 and 11 devices. They both lack certain options and I've had to go around them, like using control panel. In this case only the win 11 device is at risk of getting much worse.
It’s probably all in the registry somewhere.
honestly I still cant figure out how to configure a network interface properly without using the old control panel.
You literally can't.
There's a ton of stuff you can't do with the new garbage settings.
Let's not even mention that on an operating system called "Windows" you can only have one "window" of settings open. And opening new settings will just replace where you just where. Which is extremely rage inducing.
As admin and tech support, I use the control panel constantly. I use the settings app... for display configuration, I guess?
It's not you. There are many things you simply cannot do in the settings app.
And if you can do it, it's complicated and convoluted. I miss Win32 settings panels, everything was so well organized and simple to manage.
Yeah the new interface has restrictions it doesn’t tell you about until you try to apply new settings.
You can now reach the network connections folder, using an option on the network status page. It's something like advanced network options. Still all the classic stuff, but avoids "control panel." I'm going to guess links like that are not going to be removed.
If they just outright remove all of that, you really will need to learn how to do everything in powershell.
The goal is to move you to powershell
Are you on windows 10 or 11?
Great. So managing printers, network settings and quickly comparing settings from two places becomes a weird game of screenshots and guessing.
Remote support workers of the world collectively shake their fist in despair.
No way on this planet I will be able to explain the new UI to your average office worker.
It's as if they intentionally were making their products unusable for ADHD and especially AuDHD people.
I wonder sometimes, maybe they are. Maybe there's some policy coming from some macchiavellian cokehead in a suit, that people like us spoil their big, important social mechanisms and introduce a measure of chaos they don't want, so we have to be suppressed.
I just don't understand why Windows is such an ADHD torture today. Even XP wasn't.
It really seems sometimes as if they were going out of their way to make it such, not only MS, but also Google, Apple and who not.
Definitely an issue. I can't count the times I've slammed my head because the stupid settings screen "conveniently" switches from the previous item to another while I still expected it to open a new window just like the command panel.
I have friends who work in IT and would probably slam their head against the wall if they had to deal with Control Panel being removed.
Are Microsoft deliberately trying to make the fabled Year of the Linux Desktop finally become a reality? Because I feel like we're two or three more dumbfuck business moves away from this...
I have a PC at home that works perfectly fine. Browses the internet, emulates GameCube and Dreamcast, runs any app I need.
It's not eligible for Windows 11. In about a month MS will just stop supporting my PC, and it will not have the option to be a Windows PC despite still having plenty of service time to offer.
Microsoft is basically forcing that PC to run Linux instead.
Windows 10 is being supported until next October, you've got more than a month. That said, I've been on Linux for just over a month and I'm so much happier with it. I really like KDE Plasma as a desktop environment. I made the leap because I was unhappy with Windows, but at this point I genuinely prefer Linux.
Can confirm, want to change your domain or computer name? Windows 7/10: control panel , system , computer name tab. Windows 10 /11: control panel, system, windows settings, advanced system settings, old system control panel, computer name tab.
Why add a middle man??
slam their head against the wall
I already do that enough as it is with Windows 11...
I've been using linux for about a decade. I only know how to maintain my system and google when troubles arise. I'm pretty comfortable with my setup and would love to see many make that jump as well. However, I have to concede that corporate environments add a whole another dimension to the problem.
Control panel largely accrued content - it is generally navigated via left and right click which works great and is stable. Things don't vanish.
Settings, on the other hand, is left click only navigation mostly. It also changed constantly (usually for the worst) - tutorials written 2 years ago are no longer valid because access to that setting was removed. This makes using settings to fix things a real nightmare.
But luckily each item has a lot of "maybe you were looking for X or Y" at the bottom since you can't find anything in there. So just click anywhere, and scroll to the bottom and you'll find what you want in 2 or 3 screens.
Unless it's been removed. Then you just ask the resident IA.
Windows is so easy!
I run SuSE btw.
RIP. It’s been coming for a while, and Control Panel will likely be on hospice for a few more years, but it will be a sad day when control panel is gone.
Gone in favor of a less useful interface. Fantastic!
It is Windows...
They can just make an AI called "Control" that will handle all the settings for everyone.
Windows "god mode": https://www.howtogeek.com/402458/enable-god-mode-in-windows-10/
What is god mode?
it's simply a special folder you can enable that exposes most of Windows' admin, management, settings, and Control Panel tools in a single, easy-to-scroll-through interface
It's very easy to set this up, and it also works in Windows 11. Even if Microsoft removes access to the normal Control Panel, I seriously doubt this will be taken out.
I used to love HowToGeek, but I sadly see that now that's also enshittified (not the article you linked, but the most recent ones).
Worse, if you go to their articles via their newsletter, it redirects to aws.me domain in the middle which uBlock Origin blocks. You need to manually allow that subdomain to let it run. Plus, they now and then nudge you to create a free account to read more articles.
Oh, did I mention there is a Premium tier of their site as well? Ironical that as the site's editorial quality is coming down, the shittiness is increasing. I think originally one guy used to run it and write articles there. It was relatively frugal (compared to the churn of articles that they process today) and higher quality.
I know this but they can break it as well if they do remove it not only hide it ( class ids ). For me it's plain as the new windows settings are dead slow and it won't be usable if your computer is under very heavy load. Only cmd, maybe powershell and maybe sys internals will be what's left for you
I hate to be that guy, but why don't you just move over to Linux already? Games work. It's incredibly easy now. A nine year old could install and use xubuntu.
Why is this argument so common? "Games work on Linux now so you can switch over". As if games is the only thing holding people back. My laptops are finally running Linux full time now, but I've been looking to switch my workstation over to Linux for 25 years now and I'm still not able to fully do it due to limited software and hardware support, and I barely play any games.
I've been daily driving Linux for a long time. It's honestly still not for everyone.
Anti-cheat is still a problem Roblox is still a problem. There are still plenty of programs that people are intimately married to the don't run well under wine. You can't just tell them you can't have Photoshop Premier and Outlook anymore. Arguably a number of the people who don't fall under that criteria could be running Chromebooks.
And honestly we're not going to properly support them when their autocomplete software doesn't run under Wayland or parsec doesn't support server mode.
It's great that you either have the chops to fill in the gaps or don't run the software that has the gaps, but you really can't ask everyone to do that right?
I am past the point of having "a" computer with "an" operating system... the concept of "moving" to another OS is basically irrelevant... I use different environments for different purposes and there's no good reason to leave potential functional value unused for the sake of ideological convictions or fanboyism or whatever. My problems now revolve around having a useful cross-platform account that has access to my files on any/all of my platforms/VMs. I do lean heavily on open source software, I prefer it to proprietary.
More basically, an OS is not a food that you might like or dislike, it is a tool that you use when it is suited to the task. Discriminating against tools doesn't make sense, it only limits your capabilities.
Please read this older comment of mine, it explains my point of view on this more... and if you want to do something really interesting then try to implement Qubes and actually use it for awhile.
I use linux at home everyday but I'm stuck with windows at work. I just wanna scream.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I guarantee you they've only ported over about half of the Control Panel's features. The common stuff, sure. The rest...
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)
Gotta brush up on the ol' powershell
Talking about consistency, technically Windows still has UI elements from 3.1 era at Atleast couple of obscure places.
the control panel they're taking away is largely just antiquated and not used anymore in favour of settings app anyway
except any advanced user relies in that instead of the garbage settings menu
Users complain about changes being made and then they complain that change doesn't happen enough.
This is never going to happen fully, because there is a ton of software and also device drivers that hook into the OG Control Panel system and install their own .cpl's there, which are required for that hardware/software to work. The system to support those is going to have to remain in place, otherwise Microsoft is going to have a lot of very angry corporate customers and hardware vendors up their noses in short order.
In fact, this is most likely the exact reason the Control Panel still exists behind the scenes the way it does today in Win10 and Win11. They'll probably go to ever-greater lengths to hide it from home users, but I'd doubt they can actually remove it completely at this point.
In fact, from TFA:
Tip: while the Control Panel still exists for compatibility reasons and to provide access to some settings that have not yet migrated, you're encouraged to use the Settings app, whenever possible.
I'm sure they could keep the backend and just update the look and UI frontend though, no?
Maybe, but they can't change the look of all those third party .cpl applets.
And sure, anyone could theoretically do anything. But this is Microsoft we're talking about. They'll just put another layer of cruft on top of the five or six layers of cruft they've already got and then call it job done.
So in six months, someone will have written a third-party Windows Control Panel.
Nah it'll just be shoved into PowerToys.
Which is becoming a must have on windows.
Honestly wouldn't even be that difficult to build. Windows is just a GUI for Powershell anyway.
If they actually move all the settings over to the "new" settings app (it's actually 12 years old now): good.
It's an absolute joke that there are multiple settings apps in windows, with design inconsistency across them, and it being a crapshoot whether the screen you look at will support dark mode or not (can you tell I'm tired of being blinded on evenings by unexpected white windows? Lol).
If they don't move all the settings over: bad.
Yeah they're usually niche, but some of those options are needed!
Since this is Microsoft we're talking about, it's probably going to be the latter, unfortunately. "Oh you want to adjust some network settings? That's not in our settings app, and we've retired the control panel – you actually need to open Run and type ncpa.cpl"
It truly made no sense to me when they started the process of migrating stuff from control panel to the "new" Metro-style Settings, then just kind of... gave up and left everything as a spread-out mess. I can't believe they've left it this long to address, it's an awful user experience.
The entire point of the "new" Settings app is to be dumbed down. To include all the settings from the control panel would go against the entire point of the Settings app.
If we're talking about the latest version of Windows 11, I would say it's dumbed down, but everything I personally need is still there.
That's okay because Windows will be gone entirely from my PC in a month.
This doesn't say they're removing it, just deprecating it. I thought it had been deprecated for ages
Fine. Next desktop build is linux.
Windows 10 is RIP October 2025 anyway, so might as well.
Didn't they learn that taking away what people grew up with for more than two decades already will result in outraged customers? (Windows 8 - start menu removed and replaced by start screen)
I work on an application that went through multiple iterations of UIs. Each superseded the previous one and a new admin UI was built into them. The oldest one was using Flash.
Occasionally I still have to drill down through four layers of "open legacy UI here" to get to some obscure, long forgotten setting. Manipulating shit with half-working elements in a VM running a flash-capable browser. Day to day I just go back one iteration though, because the admin UI has everything I need there. Unlike the latest iteration.
Some day we play on killing off the flash UI version completely. We already have planned workarounds in place to manipulate those obscure settings through endpoint calls. Won't be missed. But I'd miss the second to last admin UI that has everything where I need greatly.
This is what ms is killing off now. A good UI in windows where you can find everything. And all it'd have taken to make it better is give it a robust search functionality. No one cares about going back and forth in convoluted loops between sleek UI pages. People that care to manage stuff in windows at depth will be forced into shallow shit.
The oldest one was using Flash.
I'm so sorry my dude, no one deserves that kind of suffering.
XP file search was great then it all went to shit
XP file search was slow as shit.
Everything for life! (locate (package: mlocate; run updatedb to get the initial load) for terminal on Linux, or I just use find)
If I hadn't already migrated to Linux after the insider crapshow, this probably would have forced me off.
Okay, we get it. You run Linux. Got it. Why are you posting on a thread discussing Windows control panel?
The alternative is to just keep getting fucked by Microsoft...
To gloat at morons still using windows.
I left Windows because of the Settings nonsense.
12 years later you rubes are still getting fucked by this garbage. That's why I'm here. 😂
I should have added this in my original comment, but the top 3 feature requests on the crappy insider hub were dark mode, aero/glass effect, and getting rid of redundant or poorly made UWPs (Settings, video player, pictures, etc).
In typical Microsoft fashion, they took 5 years to make functioning dark mode, told us aero/glass is impossible because of battery drain before adding it to only the edge browser, and promised "Settings" app would have all the stuff migrated from control panel "soon".
It's been 9 years and they still haven't migrated everything because turns out the control panel actually runs like a normal application that's easy to use.
They pulled the same stunts with Windows 11, which I still have left on a spare laptop on the insider release channel, and that's when I noped out after they basically ignored almost all of the top requests with really stupid reasoning.
The en-metro-ification continues.
I mean, sticking with a paradigm that existed at least since windows 3.11 (my first version of windows) isn't exactly ideal, entire software stacks are built around it existing.
It's really too bad that Microsoft abandoned Windows Phone, because that is where this UI makes sense. But shoehorning the mistake of windows 8 into everything seems like doubling down on failure.
It would be nice if a competitor entered the space where usability is the goal and be an open source solution.
Perhaps this is the year of the Linux desktop?
Turns out the year of the Linux desktop will not be heralded by making Linux better, but by making Windows worse.
It would be nice if a competitor entered the space where usability is the goal and be an open source solution.
ReactOS?
If usability is the goal, then ReactOS is not the answer.
The hero we didn't know we needed.
But have you heard of TempleOS my son?
I have two perfect logo ideas. One with a cute little penguin, the other with smirking gnu. Just spitballing here
E: corrected pitballing to spitballing, which my phone thought was the correct autocorrect...
My god, the amount of legacy crap in Windows.
They ought to just start over at some point.
On the flip side, this is what makes Windows generally very good at backwards compatibility. They do update the codebase for stuff, but still generally very backwards compatible with software and games designed to run on previous versions of Windows.
Fun Fact: Backwards compatibility is the reason you can't name a file or folder CON.
Yeah, that makes sense. If it's starting to bite them in the butt, though, maybe they should start relegating that stuff to emulation, if they can write a good enough emulator.
I don't know when. Maybe it's already gone by, maybe it's in the future. But there's probably a point in time when all of that backward compatibility stops being worth it.
Is that a real concern?
While I haven't diven into their codebase, that kind of thing tends to severely limit what developers can do to improve the product, slow them down, etc.
Be it new features, deeper UX improvements, performance optimizations... Basically anything you want to do with your progress, generally speaking, it's going to get harder the more legacy stuff you need to deal with.
Any bet the control panel is the only thing holding my dad back from switching to Linux for home use, because he absolutely hates the windows 10 and 11 settings apps.
so who's gonna build us a control panel widget. I can only code C
I'd be surprised if the windows control panel wasn't written in C.
It looks like it was written in plain html.
I'd be surprised if it is in C, it's probably in C++. That's been the language of Windows since pretty much forever.
Well there’s already WinToys, which does a lot. It may be a new project for them to just add in a legacy Control Panel tab.
Just kill all of windows already
I hope they don't make that update to windows 10 as well 😭 control panel feels faster to use than windows settings
Half of windows settings is a button that says "additional settings" that opens up the full settings window that hasn't changed since Win95. It's absolutely insane that in a decade they haven't managed to even replicate full functionality.
What a fucking piece of shit company. What's the eta to fully learn Linux, and learn how to set up a dual boot os where Linus is daily driver but a local windows account is on its own drive for emergencies and gaming.
If you have a USB stick handy, you could probably be dual booting into Linux Mint within an hour.
No need to fully learn Linux before moving to that. You can do your research using Firefox on your Linux desktop. And by “research” I mean googling/DDGing things as you need to know how to do them. It starts to stick.
For windows users I actually recommend fedora kinoite, because it's immutable it's VERY difficult to break things and also you get the benefits of safer updates, and it's plenty easier to use.
I tried to get to the printer settings today on a users machine and it kept redirecting me to the settings menu… 😠
Welp time to go back to Linux...
Hate to break it to you but Linux doesn't have the Windows Control Panel either. :P
I'll just open the play store and download the addon.. that's how this computer stuff works.. right?
I am pure linux for personal use and mac for work but:
Good. One of the biggest problems Windows has had for the past decade or so is having like three different versions of every menu and needing to figure out which one let you do what you want. Consolidate that shit
They already had that shit consolidated. It's called "Control Panel" and has been around for forty years.
And for twenty or so years they have added features that aren't in there. Hence the problem.
So unless you have a time machine, the answer is to consolidate.
Thank fuck I'm in the process of moving to Linux. I loathe the Settings app. Will be sad to not be able to say I know how to properly use Windows anymore, when I used to know it like the back of my hand. Not being able to give support to friends and family will feel really weird.
Not being able to give support to friends and family will feel really weird.
I see it as being liberated. Besides, while it'll suck to be unable to fix their problems, if it gets bad enough that they consider other operating systems, you'll be right there to help them switch!
I'm in the process of getting a family member over to Linux (again. didn't work that well last time), but still, I like to help friends and family with computers when I can and I've always taken pride in being the go-to guy who know how to fix the thing. Ah well.
ROFL, you naive sweet child. Once you're a computer expert, you'll always be so. Friends/family will still harass you and think your lying if you try use an excuse.
I can't wait for Microsoft to kill itself.
Unfortunately the best we can hope for is to detach from its shambling corpse until it exhausts its forward momentum over a decade or two and gets partitioned out at auction to some VC scavenger.
Waiting for the day the headline reads “Microsoft officially confirms its killing Windows.”
It was October 20th 2014.
Can someone explain to me the difference from Control Panel to Settings? It seems like more of a name change and of course, the UI will be different, but won't it effectively be a hub to control your personal settings just like control panel?
Currently the Settings app in windows doesn't have the same level of features as the control panel does. It's definitely got most features that normal users will need, but if you're a power user or a system admin, you'll quickly find yourself having to swap over to control panel to configure anything past the very basics for quite a few different parts of windows. This change will be fine if Microsoft achieve feature parity between settings and control panel, so that there's no lost functionality when they get rid of control panel.
I think most people are a bit upset at the idea of the control panel disappearing because they don't trust that Microsoft will end up reaching that feature parity, leaving people with less options to control their own devices effectively.
I don't think feature parity is the only problem here. Power users need information density and quick reactivity, two things that the new settings – with their huge buttons and useless animations – dearly lack.
I use to keep all my windows MGMT tools on a custom MMC screen. So organized.
That is good news - I assume they are done with the replacement as they announce this, otherwise they are just stupid. The problem is - why did it take this long time for a trillion dollar company to archive it?
If they are they haven't pushed it to general release yet. Unless someone can point out where in the settings app I can adjust my audio device speaker configuration.
Software is really hard. Replacing something that needs to continuously have new features added to it because it's not been replaced yet... You're running to stand still
Linux users be like:
TL;DR - It's being replaced renamed to "Settings"
But not really. The Settings menu has never been as useful as Control Panel and there's still a ton of functionality that can only be accessed from the Control Panel. This and many other moves by MS recently are why Windows 10 is the last version of Windows I'll be using. With the work Valve has done to support SteamDeck I can finally go 100% Linux.
So... why are people upset about this? I'd say it's about damn time. Having two settings apps is pretty ridiculous and it's honestly crazy it's taken them this long to ditch the control panel. I still remember people making fun of Microsoft's inability to drop control panel in the Windows 10 era. Is there anything special about the control panel or uniquely terrible about the settings app that would warrant this kind of negative reaction? Is it because of the settings that aren't available in settings? If they're preparing to drop control panel that probably means they're going to add whatever settings are still stranded on it to the new settings app, unless there's evidence that they won't do that.
The problem is that the settings app has consistently been a dumbed down, feature-sparse version of what was in the control panel for the bits it has replaced. Tweaks that experienced users have relied on for decades are simply missing in the settings app, forcing them to go back to the control panel
If Microsoft actually re-implemented all the knobs and dials in control panel then I wouldn't be so irritated, but we've been shown for the last several years that they only bother migrating the most commonly used settings.
I bet within a decade they pivot to barely any settings at all, claiming the released experience is the only experience you'll ever need.
they’re going to add whatever settings are still stranded on it to the new settings app,
Oh, sweet summer child.
means they're going to add whatever settings are still stranded on it to the new settings app
Lol, nope
I am curious where I’ll find the touch screen configuration utility when they do.
Because you touch y... wait no. That doesn't work here.
Let me channel my inner Microsoft and think of the most asinine...
OK, yeah, you'll have to touch and hold the right hand side of the screen for three seconds, then the left and the right for a further three, let go of the right and keep touching the left for three more, let go and then the settings will pop up. I call it "Son of sticky keys."
There will be no other way to get to those settings.
Flight simmers the world round will revolt if that dialog isn’t easy to get to or converted to modern format.
Windows 8 came out in 2012. I switched to Linux shortly after.
If you've been suffering through this as a home user you have nobody but yourself to blame.
You're not so busy you can't learn a new OS in 12 years!
Plebs.
I'm NEVER moving away from Windows 7.
Please for the love of god move off windows 7 to a secure OS like Linux or BSD
I don't understand linux. I have a raspberry pi that I haven't used in 2 years because I did an update all, which caused the fan to stop working. Which in turn mezns I can't use the thing, for fear it overheats. But I spent 20 days all day every day, just trying to figure out how to turn the fan on.
If I can't turn the fan on, and reinstalled the fan countless times, pouring hundreds of hours into something so simple, I'm not going to understand the OS.
On the opposite end of that, no way in hell I'm upgrading to windows 10 or 11.
And I'm not rich enough for a mac.
So, Windows 7 forever!
Is your computer networked? If so, that's a bad idea