Windows 10 still has two different control panels. Last year, a Microsoft PM tweeted he hadn't had to use the old control panel "in months": https://twitter.com/brandonleblanc/status/650519136196366338.... Microsoft had been shipping two control panels for three years at that point. People would be apoplectic if Apple did something like that.

This is kind of what I like about Windows 10; it can be a dumbed-down experience for people that don't care, but if you want, there are gradually escalating levels of configurability. Settings -> Control Panel -> fuck it, I'll edit the registry directly.

I would definitely not want to maintain this codebase, but as an end user, I'm happy.

macOS has something better: all the settings in one place.

Windows used to have something like that too, I think it was called the Control Panel.

> macOS has something better: all the settings in one place.

All twelve of them.

I know that's snark, but I just went and counted them anyway. There's at least 413 individual different settings in macOS Sierra's System Preferences, excluding Flash Player.

No, it doesn't. Preferences, but also 'defaults write ...', or just edit a plist...

Technically correct but very few people care about "defaults write". I can't remember the last time I used it, but I do use RegEdit often enough.

One place I've found it useful is for scripting the setup of a fresh machine, something like this:

https://blog.vandenbrand.org/2016/01/04/how-to-automate-your...

I agree it's likely very few people use it. It can be exactly the right tool for the job in some circumstances.

Yeah, that's a good reason to use it, and it makes sense that the tool is there. But there's a big difference between having a CLI tool for digging around when you need it, and having two separate GUI control panels with some settings in one, some in the other, and other settings in both.

Which is a thing of beauty compared to windows and linux. Fine grained control, yet all per-user file based and thus can easily be reset to factory.

And per user vs. system overrides.

Any thoughts about Cisco?

We're literally trying to be the taste and execution. I work for Cisco. Curious about candid thoughts.

Of routers?

I'm seriously asking. Cisco either lives on the top of rack that like 10 people in a datacenter see, much less only touch once; or it lives as a home router, that most people want to hide but still need good wifi signal.

IMO these are two different use cases. Cisco could execute almost a million times better in the datacenter by embracing better standards and making first boot and reconfiguration easier (I could write a book on this). Otherwise read as, stop pushing people to use your proprietary management systems for your gear, make those tools generally applicable then maybe people would use them.

On the consumer side, I have less experience with Cisco, but making it dead simple to deal with things like multiple wifi access points would be big, with as little setup involvement as necessary. Apple had a really simple to setup router, though it's generally been underpowered and didn't allow for more advanced configurations.

Cisco Anyconnect and the ASA web interface reeks of an outsourced enterprise developed massive legacy code base haunted by developers pissed all over by meddling middle managers. If you were going for the opposite of taste and execution you knocked it out of the park.

ISP Owner here. I wouldn't call their hardware visually appealing. In UI, we mostly use CLI - so not sure what more can be done in that regard. A visual way to looking at live traffic info similar to iftop/htop would be nice.

I want to add the cisco-IOS is an absolute clusterfuck. There is so much room for improvement I wouldn't know where to start. Please have a loot at Mikrotik, they are doing a pretty decent job for a small company. If their devices were powerful enough to handle our edge router traffic, I would drop cisco like a brick. I am not kidding.

Someone really needs to fund Mikrotik big time.

Personally, I say ditch IOS completely and give me a flat ecosystem of Linux or BSD well tuned to the hardware and completely open sourced. Allow interesting features like SNABB-switch type userspace packet management. Throw in some (k)ASLR and other such security mechanisms. Perhaps most important: make an ecosystem that can compete with Ubiquiti for both "average" consumers and developers in terms of hardware but especially software.