Dave.

It seems that every new release adds another layer of indirection (misdirection?) between you and the useful stuff you need to access. I use a third party utility to manage IP settings, and it’s one click from its menu to get to the network adapter page. It takes me about 5 minutes of angry clicking around in stock standard win11 before I get to the same place.

The main one I use is the network adaptor settings, where you can enable/disable protocols and most importantly for me, where you can easily add multiple IP addresses on a network adaptor.

The Win 8+ network settings page is an absolute trainwreck. I particularly like how it doesn’t warn about conflicting IP addresses now and just silently accepts your given address and provides an auto-assigned 169.254 address instead if it sees even the smallest hint of another computer out there using the address you want to use.

Guaranteed fun and confusion trying to access/ping things until you finally check the status of the network adaptor and discover the auto assigned address, thanks Microsoft.

Not everyone wants to use dhcp, which is clearly their preferred direction, and there have been bugs where Cisco devices trigger that flip to auto assigned addresses even if things are fine.

Microsoft applied a data-driven approach to find out which features to add now, which features to add later, and which to completely avoid.

Which is why if you dig deep enough into Settings you’ll see WinXP Control Panel UI elements. You know, the elements that are actually useful for power users.

Which is worse?

• Entire driver written in a non memory safe language?
• The interface to the rest of the kernel is marked as unsafe and then the other X percent is safe from memory corruption?

Surely if X > 0 then this is still a net improvement?