It's a humongous engineering project and I can see what they're doing. It's a super painful and long transition, but where they've finished the transition, I like it. Very nicely organized, searchable, it makes a lot of sense, it's consistent. It's a great UI, we're just in the middle of the construction site.
I imagine they didn't have any other way to do it.
If they don't do it, everyone complains that the Control Panel is getting antiquated, if they do it, people complain why they're changing it like this.
We have to be realistic here.
My favorite example of this is the sound output setting. Windows has two output "streams" - communication and media. The old menu used to have a "set default" button that set a device to default for both, but you could also set each default manually. The new menu doesn't make that distinction at all, but the new default device switcher only switches the playback default. This results in things like Skype, Zoom, Discord... seemingly not respecting the output device setting. The only way to fix this is through the old menu, but they have removed every trace of it, so you have to trick Windows by searching for "sounds" to get to the place where you change things like the error message sound, which pops up a window where you can then switch the tab to the old sound control panel.
I don't think there's been a single month since this change was pushed out where I didn't have to help someone with this. It's clearly broken, clearly
Just use pavucontrol (Pulseaudio volume control) which comes included with most distros.
The new UI seems to be very forward facing, I suspect that they're targeting everything with it: desktop, mobile, even AR/VR.
Yes, tomorrow evening when I have time, not literally right now in the middle of a 2-day 3D render that my computer has been running for a 24 hours now.
> It takes less than 5 minutes to disable and hide it.
Until an update re-enables it or pops an un-hidable fullscreen popup with misleading questions that tricks you into enabling it again.
> [absurd UIs]
You can't possibly be defending the shitshow that is the Win10 setting menu! Everyone hates it, from techies, developers, gamers, grandmas... I could probably write an essay just about the actual bugs and missing features, not even counting stupid design.
> [telemetry]
See the Cortana reply above
> [resources]
Few people are running <1GB of RAM, true, but very many are still running 4GB. That means you can basically open a Word document and two Chrome tabs before your system becomes unusable. This isn't an exaggeration - if the two tabs are heavy (like FB and Gmail, for example), the system will aready start swapping.
For another datapoint, I can no longer play certain games (heavily modded) on Win, because they actually need at least 6GB or RAM and that's enough to crash my 8GB system. On Linux, I can run the game, Spotify and like 3 Firefox tabs on the same machine, and I'm using a DE that notorious for high RAM usage (KDE Plasma).