I get the sense that changing old things in Windows is a herculean task, while adding new things is much easier.

At some point management had the inclination to essentially wipe the board and start over, and they did that by effectively overlaying a new interface on an old OS. No matter how much of a Msoft fanboy you are, the "some settings are in metro and others are in 7" thing has been clunky and dumb since Vista. They've fixed very little of that.

Since they are redesigning Notepad it seems like they are taking on these legacy things piece by piece.

10 has gotten a lot better at the Control Panel thing, most things can be done in Metro settings finally. Still find myself opening ncpa.cpl whenever I have to touch anything network related though

The Metro panel is still crap in comparison to the old one: the density of information is really low and its poor layout make it hard to use it.

Maybe not the same thing but the settings app is promoted as a faster way of doing everything compared to the control panel but I find it the opposite. The only thing is it's harder to open the control panel than it used to be

> The only thing is it's harder to open the control panel than it used to be

<trys> [WinKey] "con" [Enter]

Nope, still just as easy.

Your taskbar search must work considerably better than mine. It's a complete crapshoot what it'll decide to find if I'm not super careful and let it finish loading. Hence why I'm still a user of Classic Shell.

I observe the same. Determinism is quite important to get things done quickly. Instead, typing "expl" gives me a lottery between Internet Explorer and whatever their file manager is called.

The one that REALLY gets me is search for "Windows Update".

If I do it too quickly, it can't find the update control panel and I end up with an Edge window searching Bing for "Windows update"

I think the key is to turn off Cortana and all the internet searching stuff. If I want to search the internet, I'll use a browser.

How is it still such utter crap? It's been 6 years since the Settings app came out. The prior control panel basically was introduced in Windows 95/NT 4.0: http://toastytech.com/guis/win952.html. Six years before that is 1989, when Windows 2.1.1 came out: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_2.1x#/media/File:Windo.... The degree to which progress has slowed is remarkable. Especially for software that basically does the same thing the old version did (maybe even less work, given that devices today are more self-configuring).

Windows Vista brought another half-hearted control panel rework, where the settings pages were built into the control panel window instead of dialog boxes popping out of it.

Windows 10's 'Settings > System > About > System Info > Change Settings'.

Is Windows Vista's 'Control Panel > System > Change Settings'.

Is Windows 98's 'Control Panel > System'.

count the number of clicks to check/change ntp host... its an amazing maze, I think you can reach all 4 different themes of configuring date & time

My favorite part of Windows is the collection of "open file" dialogs exist. There has to be at least a dozen by this point. Windows 10 has one that was made in Vista/7 days that is actually broken. You can select the file and everything, but the ribbon has an old style and is black text on a dark background. Oh, and highlighting something won't actually highlight it.

The best is this dialog, which is the exact same layout as in Windows 3.1: http://www.intelliot.com/2008/08/windows-vista-install-font-...

The dialog in 3.1: http://notebooks.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/...

It likely has exactly the same layout because sometime, long ago, some program (e.g. Adobe Type Manager) extended that UI, either by patching its code or by overlaying part of the window with frameless windows containing new controls.

Backwards compatibility doesn’t only apply to APIs.

It also got used less and less. You had to really try hard to install fonts that way and why bother changing something that (a) works, and (b) only a tiny fraction of your users are ever going to see.

Adding a font no longer uses that dialog. It was fun though - an Easter egg in the time beyond Easter eggs.

Windows 10 brought back "for real" a lot of the 'desktop' flavor that was tossed out the window in Windows 8. (keeping the tradition of having every other Windows release be usable :-)).

The addition of the Linux console pushed it over the edge for me in terms of which OS I boot by default when I boot my laptop.

It's more related with "We won't touch Classic Desktops (Win32), because it's basically deprecated". They update the inbox UWP apps almost every day.

Mostly it is the realization that breaking backwards compatibility is bad for business. If corporations risk having to toss their bespoke stack over some MS internal decision, said corporations may decide to go with some alternative in the future.

Hopped back onto Windows last year after a long time away - all the keyboard shortcuts and obscure registry settings I knew from Win95 still worked. Maybe some people would see that as a bad sign, but I loved it.

It's their obsession with backwards compatibility.

It's really hard to fix old broken things when mission critical applications rely on them being broken. But relatively easy to add new features without breaking changes.