...if functionality previously accessible via the control panel didn't make it into the settings app. Except of course if a setting were now redundant.

Name a redundant setting.

Every so often I start trying to tweak something in Settings. Almost every. single. time. I give up, swearing, and invoke Control Panel. If Settings was better it would be shite.

The new printers area is (or was the last time I bothered looking) hopeless. New Outlook is a similar downgrade on what went before.

The windows Control Panel is one of the few things the Linux users can't get enough of. Why did MS even consider getting rid.

probably going to make it cloud based like every stupid fucking thing

Because M$, not you, intends to be in control of your system. This is clearly demonstrated by the increasing absence of fine adjustments available to users from the "settings" ap.

I never read anyone commenting about this, but the name change from older versions' " My PC" to Win10 "This PC" is a good example of this insidious trend

Maybe you meant, “Power Shell?”

(I actually don’t care what they’re doing to the Windows, I run “legacy” versions anyway. Once you run Virt-Manager, all other operating systems become just more programs you can run within Linux. Kind of like redefining all Imperial measurement systems in terms of S.I. — in one fell swoop the whole world is metric, whether they knew it or not!)

Yep, referring to a shell as "the command line" just shows ignorance of what a shell actually does. It is (at least the unix-style ones, can't comment on the M$ "object shell"!) a sophisticated programming environment, not just a bloated way of getting arguments into a program!

The Unix shell was conceived as a means of separating the low-level OS user interface from the kernel. As the only option at the time was a character-based interface using teletypes it was implemented as commands issued as lines of text, hence a command line.

Because os the layered nature of Unix it was possible to replace one shell with another so although you might be thinking of the Bourne shell or, possibly more likely, bash there were many others, ksh and csh being a couple I've used. Although, as you say, they have become programmable (and also implement some commands as built-ins) the essence has always been invoking other programs and providing parameters to them. If one wanted to be unkind (which I wouldn't) it would even be possible to describe that programmability as bloat.

With the arrival of GUIs we new have GUI-based shells. But if it's a text based shell interpreting lines of text as commands, then it's a command-line shell. What else could it be?

I disagree. As well as providing logical constructions: loops, conditionals, they also provide argument processing, background execution, high-level IO/redirection, error trapping etc.

Interactive shells provide even more (although I wouldn't run a batch script in bash unless I _really_ needed the one or two text substitutions it provides over dash).

The term "command line" is more suited to the data that a program receives, than what a shell provides. You can see a list of command lines in the output of "top -c".

Calling a shell a "command line" is a travesty! Because that is now all that most people think it can do.

Most people are cushioned by high level applications and don't work at the pointy end of making computers do things directly (no safety net!). It was called a command line because originally after the computer powered on it sat waiting for commands (entered one line at a time) and anything the operating system could do was accessible from there (via teletype or VDU terminal). previous to it's invention the operator couldn't do a lot more than flip switches to read a pre-prepared card stack/tape reel do do anything.

The DOS CLI had (has?) a very limited range of functions only because the original underlying hardware was very limited, it occupied a desktop not an entire room. My guess is that the term 'Shell' originated from the fact that Unix was providing a not too robust common looking CLI to the actual working parts of different systems.

By the early '80s minicomputer CLIs had a level of complexity that allowed near programming language levels of control and MS 'PowerShell' is just a marketing change of name now that it does have the full blown capabilities of other 'shell' named systems.

You can call it a Shell or CLI, to my old brain they're utterly interchangeable

At this stage, what ever Microsoft decide to do, I will reverse with a ddofferent piece of software.

Screw the start menu, screw you, I'll get a program to bring it back.

This is no different. As with all MS OSs, the old version is still in there if you dig deep enough. I remember there still being 3.11 dialogue boxes in 10 if you went far enough. So the options will just be gathered up an repackaged into a control panel again by someone else.

Nuts to the and their ideas about how I should work.

You will tire before they do ;)

Seeing s they have reversed it already... No I don't think so.

erm, till the next time.

M$ staff read El Reg articles and comments.

And get inspired, and make changes. And a PDP-11.

"You didn't like it when we said 'deprecated' to describe what we're doing so we'll stop saying that."

I find it amusing how the last several versions of Windows have prettied up the management screens. But if you go deep enough Windows will throw you dialogs straight out of Windows 95 once you get to the point they never got around to fully implementing replacement interfaces.

I love how Windows 11 shows this nice new pretty right-click context menu in file manager, complete with "share & enjoy" icon at the bottom.

Then you click "Show more options" and it's replaced by the old standard Windows menu.

I think someone got one over on his manager at Microsoft.

I'd forgotten about that. It was one of the very first Win11 annoyances that I just had to fix. There's a registry hack to always show the "classic" menu.

Wait until you see the failover cluster "move storage" screen on Server 2019 (and I think 2022?).

It's like something out of Windows 95 and you can ONLY drag and drop your extremely critical VMs and their storage individually onto the new location ***in a treeview*** for where you'd like them to move to.

They'll have to pry the .cpl filenames from my cold, dead hands (or my rapidly fading memory).