The "settings app" is a convoluted mess which is made worse by the fact that it wholeheartedly embraced the weird "everything is an app, except for some things" philosophy.

There are settings that only apply to some "apps", there are "app wide settings", there are important settings hidden 4 layers deep under some category where one would never suspect them to be.

Then there's the fact that MS has the tendency to just silently revert settings, often privacy and telemetry related, after updates. On that end, Windows 10 very much feels like it's actively working against the user, it feels like you are only a tolerated guest on your own system.

> MS has the tendency to just silently revert settings

This is so user-hostile it's not even funny. Imagine if you had someone in your life who silently went back on agreements when you weren't looking. You would work to remove them from your life as soon as possible.

That's a lot of words to say "I didn't read what you wrote but I still want to feel superior."

It's fewer words actually.

Both are 13 words (or if you count contractions as two words, both are 14 words).

Huh, guess he was just trying to be succinct then.

The thing mentioned in this bit?

> We think its better buried in the settings. And you'll have to set it back later.

The settings app is useless. Even win 3.0 had better settings than settings app in win 10.

You haven't used it in a while. Microsoft is slowly re-implementing or dropping all of the Windows 3.x/9x era Control Panel settings.

A criticism of the Settings App as it stands today based on your usage of it a year ago is very unfair as it's continuously improving and evolving.

> A criticism of the Settings App as it stands today based on your usage of it a year ago

How do you know his/her opinion is based on year-old usage?

I don't, but MS ships an annual update that for the past couple years has included expansion of the Settings App and remove of Control Panel widgets. The original Settings App that shipped with Windows 10 was, as the op said, useless.

As MS has slowly whittled down and removed features from the Control Panel, they have simultaneously added analogs where appropriate in the Settings App. The Settings App in 20H2 is very different and far from useless when compared to what shipped a year ago, or when Windows 10 launched.

The main criticism of Windows settings is the silent reversion of settings which is tantamount to ignoring them. If Microsoft improved the clarity of the settings menu then that's nice, but ultimately irrelevant.

You shouldn't need a third-party utility for re-disabling settings after updates, and it's pretty clear at this point that Microsoft just doesn't give a damn about respecting the user's choices.

I'm cranky about the settings app as it stands right now