You may have seen dark rumors around the Web that Microsoft is about to kill off the classic Control Panel. Rest assured, friend, we were as horrified as you are—but on more careful inspection, this seems not to be the case.
That’s one of the many downsides of being at the mercy of closed operating systems like Windows or macOS – as a user, you’re not really in control, and your platform landlords can decide to remove vital functionality or features on a whim, and there’s nothing you can do about it.
If you haven’t done so yet, I’d highly suggest start looking at open source alternatives before it’s too late, because I feel the noose is only going to tighten more, not less.
This why people didn’t abandon XP till their 15 years old computers really broke down. This is why they won’t upgrade 7 for another 5 years or so.
We’re not teenagers. I just want my computer to do what I tell it to. I don’t want to learn a new interface.
This. And this again.
https://otter-browser.org/ : “Controlled by the user, not vice versa”
I don’t fear change and learning is fun. If the changes have some purpose, if they make the system more reliable, easier to automate, easier for newbies to learn, or even a bit more interesting, then I’ll support them. But I do agree in this case some may have scripted / automated solutions that might be damaged if the old Control Panel is discarded.
As if open source was any better.
When the AMD open source driver came to be they decided to stop supporting my netbook APU, while newer kernels cannot handle the legacy driver.
So thanks to this situation, my GPGPU can only do a partial set of its features, including not being able to do video hardware decoding.
Other examples would be GNOME 3, KDE 5 and those that aren’t willing to move on.
If there isn’t anyone willing to pick up the task, open source doesn’t make it any better.
Exactly. They keep writing stuff like “with FOSS the user is in control”. I’m a user, not a programmer, and even if I were a programmer, would I have the time and competence to patch Gnome to my tastes and keep up with the updates? No, I’m reliant to others’ work and choices just as I am with proprietary software. If Gnome takes away functionality, there’s nothing _I_ can do. Sure, the chances that someone can are higher, but as a user I’m still stuck with someone else’s choices.
I love Linux, I used it exclusively for years, and even now I happily dual-boot between W10 an Mint, but I waited for years to have a decent DAW, and Ardour never delivered for me. So I went back to Windows10 and found an OS that is perfectly usable, the WSL satisfies my command line addiction, I can use nvim, I have multiple virtual desktops, the touch screen works better than with Linux, and the audio works flawlessly, unlike in Linux where I sometimes encounter annoying issues like mono YouTube videos insisting to feed the audio to a nonexistent central speaker (so I can’t hear anything).
FOSS has huge merits and it built a great ecosystem, but “the user is in control” is just BS.
emarsk,
You are wrong. Open source absolutely and undeniably DOES give users more control overall. The real barrier is the fact is that you don’t want to pay for it, which I understand. But don’t say you don’t have control, because that is just BS. Technically you DO have the ability to adapt an open source project to your own needs exactly as my clients do. Non of them are any good at programming, yet they all have open source customized to their needs and requirements. The difference between them and you is not time nor technical expertise, on the contrary it is simply that they are willing & able to pay for what they want.
That’s the funny part about about software, many people will shell out many thousands to hire carpenters/plumbers/electricians/etc to offset the fact that they personally don’t have the skills or time to do it themselves, yet when it comes to software, so many people become cheapskates and want everything to be free. Incidentally this is exactly why the industry is so keen on data mining and advertising
Regardless, even if you don’t have the money or energy to do it yourself, when it comes to open source there is still a chance that you can find other people who share your complaints and have created a fork to provide support for the features that you want. A good case study is linux mint, with mate and cinnamon desktops, which was a high quality alternative for those who didn’t like what ubuntu & gnome were doing. If windows were open source, microsoft would be more responsive to user feedback, otherwise someone else would fork windows and large numbers of users would flock to it. While you may choose not to acknowledge or appreciate it, open source does enable freedom from singular corporate control.
Excellent reply, thanks!
To the naysayers, google “hire a linux dev” and you should be able to find someone who can make whatever changes you need.
Yes, I’m sure the average person would be willing to hire someone to make a minor change in their software. Get a life. To most people, a computer is a tool, not a lifestyle or ideology. They’re not going to pay thousands to hire a developer to fix a UI problem they don’t like. They’ll either put up with it, or switch to another tool. And as long as that new tool works better than the old one, they don’t care about the ideology or openness behind it.
Ah, yes, the theoretical you can pay to have software altered for you. Yes, and then I’m stuck with an out of tree patch set that will have to continually be kept up to date, if I want to use the newer releases of upstream. Doable for corporations, but I’m not a 1%-er. So in reality I am dependent on what is put out there.
“You could have the programmer upstream the patches…” Yes, if upstream accepts them, which is unlikely, because I had to have the software altered because upstream didn’t have the feature I wanted. They probably felt their software didn’t need that particular bell.
I do have more options to choose from with FOSS. If a project goes off the deep end, the chances of a saner fork are infinitely higher than with a proprietary project. I can switch distros if need be. Paying for custom software? Not so much. I have a household to keep above water and bespoke software is a luxury I can’t afford.
“If Gnome takes away functionality, there’s nothing _I_ can do. Sure, the chances that someone can are higher, but as a user I’m still stuck with someone else’s choices.”
But in the case of Gnome someone did. Try that with Windows or MacOS.
You can replace the shell in windows
https://www.techrepublic.com/pictures/five-cool-alternatives-to-the-windows-7-desktop-shell/
It was possible in mac, before they removed the x11 server. I ran KDE on Darwin/maxosx.
Which APU would that be? The Radeon open source driver supports everything all the way back to the R100 series from 2000.
AMD Radeon HD 6320
Good enough for 2D yes, everything that the previous driver offered for OpenGL 4.4 and video decoding, not really.
moondevil,
I haven’t used any AMD GPUs in a long time. Hypothetically though things could get better for the open source community if the proprietary drivers are leaked:
http://www.osnews.com/story/131579/amd-uses-dmca-to-mitigate-massive-gpu-source-code-leak/
I’m really on the fence about using the information to improve open source drivers. I believe AMD has a right to privacy and I don’t condone the behavior of employees or infiltrators doing this, yet once the reality is that these proprietary drivers are “out there” anyways, is it unethical to use?
I can see a utilitarian argument saying that the net benefit to the FOSS community far outweighs the net loss to AMD. I look at it this way: I’ll acknowledge AMD could suffer if the code gets into the hands of a cheap hardware clone, however this damage is already done whether or not FOSS platforms uses the leaked code to improve open source drivers. I don’t think that developers using the leaked code to improve FOSS driver support of AMD hardware would cause any additional harm to AMD, if anything it could even help AMD by way of better support for its hardware.
AMD engineers under NDA working on Mesa3D would already have access to that if they needed it…. That said, what was in the leak was hardware design descriptions in verilog… which have almost nothing to do with the drivers themselves ( I believe they do use some code generation for hardware interfaces but that’s it and it would be delivered to the software teams most likely and not generated by them directly). Basically this is the code used to generate the logic that then gets laid out and fabbed on the chips. From what I hear there is some interesting stuff in there but nothing that pertains to developing drivers. I think the leak contained some info about the the vector engine itself in RDNA1/2 which is unlike what you would think (conceptually think giant VLIW 4096bit FPU with a command processor on front, it just looks like a bunch of CUs from the outside most CPUs these days are like this anyway) Anyway I haven’t read the code myself so my understanding is probably a bit fuzzy about it as well as partially based on guesswork.
AMD already documents the GPU very well from a software development perspective.
cb88,
I only read the article, which didn’t specify exactly what was leaked. I don’t have any AMD GPUs and I can’t really say much about the quality of the open source mesa drivers. On the nvidia side of things my experience is that the open source nouveau drivers are behind and more often than not I’ve been able to fix glitches by switching to the proprietary drivers. Nvidia contributes some stuff but the proprietary blobs still contain secrets that disadvantage the open source driver.
https://nouveau.freedesktop.org/wiki/FAQ/#index7h3
I really considered going with an AMD GPU last time, but their performance/power numbers plateaued for a while. Maybe next time.
Your GPU should be using the R600 drivers, no?
Mesa Matrix shows that as supporting OpenGL 4.5 and OpenGL ES 3.1.
VA-API and VDPAU should also be supported too with ‘libva-mesa-driver’ and ‘mesa-vdpau’.
No Vulkan support, though.
https://mesamatrix.net/
Might be, but glxinfo or my own coding attempts, aren’t able to use what the table shows it is supposed to be hardware supported.
It’s a terascale 2 GPU not even GCN so … don’t expect much.
I have a 6310 GPU in another laptop of mine 3D works fine… but it is a small old mobile GPU limit your expectations. It can run things like Cube2 and OpenArena at decent framerates…. I’ve even rand borderlands 2 on it on Windows but it is not a beast of a GPU.
It is also likely it will never get Vulkan support since it’s a very old architecture.
It’s true that a non-developer might be limited in what they can do but that hasn’t stopped people from forking code bases.
For instance, if you hate GNOME 3, you can always use MATE that offers a modern GTK3 version of GNOME 2. Likewise, if you hate KDE 5, you can use the Trinity Desktop Environment that gives you a modern, supported KDE 3.5 desktop.
If someone doesn’t like the design philosophy of a piece software, there is usually an alternative that exists.
The problem with Trinity is that it forks QT rather than porting onto the newer version of QT…. this means you end up with library bloat in your system you could literally end up with at least two version of QT (TQT3 and QT5 , GTK3 and whatever else…).
So dramatic. Quick folks, leave before it’s too late.
Well, to be as fair as possible, Microsoft do need to do something about the disaster that is the dual Settings/Control Panel setup eventually. Some settings are in settings, others in control panel, and yet others in both places yet they do slightly different things when they do overlap. I do not want them to break any automated scripts. That said, merging this mess into one app makes sense. Maybe it’ll even be better organized… nah, who am I kidding?
I won’t cry over the retirement of the classic Control Panel.
I don’t think anyone will cry over the control panel itself. However, it does act as a framework for a good deal of automation tasks related to system settings which are not yet possible to do through the settings app. As long as the automation works, or they do an equivalent, it’s fine with me… just as long as all the settings are still available, of course. If they remove some of the tweaks you can only do in control panel and don’t provide an equivalent in settings, you’re going to see a lot of users annoyed then. I suppose, at that point, we’ll see the resurgence of TweakUI and other tools like it.
Not in control….. Well…. When did I feel that with Windows for the first time…. Let’s see. Uhmmm…. Can someone say Windows 8? Yes. The end of my Windows days, were 4 years before support ended for Win7. Without MacOS and Windows, I am finally free again, like in the old golden days of MS-Dos, AmigaOS and Commodore64-Basic. Ironically only one of those, were not made by Microsoft.