Oh my god, as a UI designer by trade, the sheer STATE of the Windows OS will send me into a rant far too long (and that I'm far too sober for right now) for a hacker news comment. It's a TRAVESTY. If you try and modify certain system settings you will see, in no particular order, the slightly cleaned up Metro ala Windows 11 (I honestly don't know if this got a name), remnants of the original Metro from 8/10, the modified refreshed control panel from windows 7/vista, and as you point out, dialogs that are seemingly ported directly from as old as Windows 98.

I don't know who if anyone really is heading the UX department at Microsoft, but they should either be empowered to their job properly or fucking fired, and I couldn't tell you which.

Lots of people in this thread (correctly!) pointing out Apple's struggles with releasing high quality user software on MacOS. But at least when they changed the System Settings UI in MacOS Ventura (10.13) they managed to stick the landing. Not that I necessarily _like_ the new Settings UI, but there's no jumping into old UIs to configure things.

Microsoft released Windows 8 in 2012, and here we are 13 years later using interaction panels that have only gotten minor chrome updates since their original release in Windows 95 (looking at you, Advanced System Settings and Device Manager).

It really is the worst of both worlds. I don't like change for change's sake which we seem to agree on (though I do like the newer MacOS but we can agree to disagree there, that's strictly a matter of subjective taste) but it is INFURIATING and frankly should be embarrassing what a mess Windows is now. Change for change's sake is bad enough, they're currently doing... change for change's sake but not changing the whole thing because either they can't be fucked to finish the job or it was, for whatever reason, technically infeasible to complete it but they released it half-done anyway, in Windows Vista, 7, 8, 10 and now 11. How fucking embarrassing.

Yeah, but the fear I have is that if they put somebody like you in charge they'd prioritize visual consistency over functionality and things would just get dropped.

On some level it's an embarrassment, on the other level I never run into a "can't get there from here" experience though I had an awkward experience the other day when I brought home a bargain monster TV from the reuse center and found I had to look across a several different screens to find all the settings to get the video output properly matched to the TV.

> Yeah, but the fear I have is that if they put somebody like you in charge they'd prioritize visual consistency over functionality and things would just get dropped.

But the thing is functionality is already being impacted! I had an experience the other day where I was trying to manually configure an IP address for an ethernet interface to configure a piece of hardware, one of those situations where it lacks DHCP but I knew what the IP scheme was and so I just had to configure an address, gateway and subnet in order to be able to talk to this damned thing, which I was eventually able to do. But, crucially as I'm trying to do this, Windows pushes me towards a Modern/Metro UI version, which, fine, whatever, but when I entered my information it would then show a series of "in progress" dots across the bottom of the screen, presumably because it was attempting to verify it had internet access on this interface, which it obviously didn't and wouldn't, but it did have internet access via the WLAN card. This contradiction seemed to confuse the shit out of the Settings app, as it presented no error and eventually seemed to just... shrug and do the thing I'd asked.

Except it didn't work, and I spent an hour troubleshooting why I couldn't yet communicate to the thing, only to eventually out of exasperation go to the control panel to see if the old UI version of this (right click interface, properties, ipv4, properties) only to find out it NEVER SET THE ADDRESS I SPECIFIED AT ALL! Presumably because it couldn't verify it now had internet with those settings, or maybe because the UI was just broken, I don't know.

(Also interestingly CMD thought it had the address configured, but no subnet or gateway, and the old UI had none of it and it was still configured as DHCP)

And like, this is just bad software design, bordering on incompetent software design, for several reasons:

* We have an in-progress "I'm doing something" indicated from the OS, and I'm assuming it was in fact doing something, but it was not indicated at all what was being done, or why, or the result of what was done or what went wrong, which is simply horrendous.

* It was, I'm guessing, attempting to verify connectivity, but that was not explained to me, nor was it presented as an option as it is in the old UI (there's a checkbox that says "validate this when I'm done" and you can leave it off, which I did which then worked as I thought it would)

* Somehow, these three functions to show an interface's state (CMD, old UI, new UI) are all producing different outputs to one another about the same interface, which is just BONKERS in terms of software designed to manage a system, and implies severe fragmentation in the core of the OS.

So, just so I'm understood, I don't think Windows 11 is embarrassing because it has different UI conventions present simultaneously. I think it's embarrassing because of what that fragmentation means for lower, more important parts of the OS. It's a less important thing that points at a more important thing.

>The strangest thing about this is in the system configuration dialogs where they have a set of really gee whizzy modern configuration screens but you still have to go into 15 year old screens to do many common tasks

I much prefer the older screens. They are so much easier to use.