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by graypegg 1104 days ago
I think one of the weirdest things to me is how unchanged OSX / MacOS is. As much as I like this specific paradigm of computing UI, I kind of see why they’ve been trying new things as of late. (Stage manager, new settings panel, iOS-y control centre)

Just because it’s old, doesn’t mean it NEEDS to change, but I can imagine the need to at least explore a bit if something stays mostly the same for 20 years.

1 comments

It seems like "EVERYTHING" Apple has done in this arena just ensures I'll have to use a search function to find what I want. Same is true for Windows 10+. "I just want to format a USB Thumbdrive!!! why do I have to search for some sort of Disks section in the Control Panel??"
I mean, why not? I think a lot of people under-20 will instinctively think of “erase this whole disk and put a new file system on it” as a very “settings” sort of thing, not something to be done in a separate application like Disk Manager. (Which is technically a hold over from when OSes did not ship with extensive disk management tools, so normally you would have some flavour of Norton Utilities installed after-market.)

If you’ve grown up with phones and tablets, anything that’s a change to the device, even if it’s an operation and not a setting, is in “settings”.

I get it, doesn’t mean I agree with it to be fair! I miss old system preferences as much as you.

Why can't this function be found in several places at once?
Windows has multiple settings and control panel lists to launch the exact same control panel applications. Or even duplicate UI to control the same setting.

I think generally that’s seen as confusing, and probably not something worth striving for IMO.

Not that there aren't more settings/apps/etc nowadays, but your example doesn't apply well for macOS because Disk Utility has been in the same location since the first version over 20 years ago, in /Applications/Utilities/.
That particular example is Windows 10, that's correct.

My comment was mostly about how to find things in the new "settings" experience.

embrace search. command+space is dmenu and command+f is dmenu for a specific context