[avidphantasm]

It's just a big dumb list that I now have to use search to find anything in. My guess is that someone doesn't want to spend developer and designer resources curating the old design. Now they can more or less shove new things into the list and call it a day. Sad.

[kitsunesoba]

One thing that I think makes System Settings much worse than it has to be is how indistinguishable its sidebar icons are. They all have the same shape, some share the same background color or have very similar background colors, their glyph shapes are thin, and the white glyph color has extremely bad contrast with some of the background colors.

If the icons were more akin to 10.6 Snow Leopard sidebar icons[0] it'd give the sidebar items much more substantial visual anchors. Heck even the more muted sidebar icons of 10.7 Lion[1] would be a substantial improvement.

[0]: https://www.versionmuseum.com/images/operating-systems/mac-o... [1]: https://512pixels.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/10-8-Mounta...

[mattkevan]

I've used macOS since the early betas and could never find what I wanted in the big dumb grid. Had to use search every time.

IMO the sidebar is more usable as I can just scan down to find the right option, or just use the search as before.

[avidphantasm]

I don't dispute your experience. However, for me the old grid provided a two-dimensional spatial hierarchy (if that's a thing) that made it easy for me to quickly drill down to what I wanted. The new list version has a one-dimensional flattened hierarchy with many more categories to consider at the top level. With so many choices my brain shuts down and I just resort to search.