zlacker

Night mode (blue light filter) is naitvely supported/builtin

Dark theme

HDR support

Auto HDR for many older games

Native system wide support for surround sound in headphones with hrtf

Win+Shift+S screenshot tool

It took a long time to get here, but the settings app is now better than the old Control Panel imo

If you're a gamer then HDR/surround/raytracing can potentially be huge upgrades if your hardware supports it.

>>the_pw+(OP)
>Dark theme

Windows has had themes/color schemes since 3.0 - yes the early 90s

Ray tracing has nothing to do with Windows, either

>>xxs+18
Dark theme isn't the windows color theming that always existed. It's the actual system setting that instructs apps to use dark mode. It's in UXTheme.dll (an OS lib) and the function app devs use to query it is ShouldSystemUseDarkMode(). This was introduced in Windows 10 1903.

Drawing the line between the OS and "not the OS" is really difficult. Direct X is included with the OS and DX12 is not compatible with Windows 7 so basically DirectX 12 is something you did not have in Win7 and do Have in Win10.

>>xxs+18
If I can't use the Hotdog Stand theme, something has gone wrong (which it has).

>>the_pw+(OP)
Windows 7 was released over a decade ago and the OS brings in revenue on the order of 10s of billions annually.

Night mode, dark theme, and a decent UI are things shoestring Linux distros can pull off.

>>alkona+Pc
> It's the actual system setting that instructs apps to use dark mode.

Dark mode being use as a short hand - pretty much all "standard" controls used to have colors and font size defined. So if an application wants to draw text - it'd use the text area background and color, likewise for buttons. Being replaced with a single boolean configuration option is just a lazy downgrade. Also I don't quite see it as an OS function - in the end it just reads the registry.

Vulcan was supported on Win7 (along w/ the raytracing) and oddly enough Win7 had a port of DX12 by Microsoft [0]. It was quite an arbitrary decision to prevent Win7 & 8 to run DX12. I suppose one of the issues is that GPU drivers (esp. AMD) do not support Win7 (or 8)

[0]: https://venturebeat.com/pc-gaming/directx-12-windows-7/

>>alkona+Pc
Ubuntu has had that kind of dark mode for years.

>>alkona+Pc
> Dark theme isn't the windows color theming that always existed.

Yes, and no. The colour theming that has existed since at leats Windows v2 could be used to implement dark more quite easily if only your apps listened to the relevant settings (some did, many did at least partially due to the framework they were written in doing so, some didn't at all – partially is the worse option as it caused contrast problems between compliant and non-compliant parts).

> It's the actual system setting that instructs apps to use dark mode.

The old theming was through system settings too. There were GDI API calls to read the values so you could make your app mirror the user's choices. Not as convenient as a single “dark mode” switch but no different other than that affordance. Many toolkits did this for you.

>>xxs+Zf
The fact remains there was no system setting for dark mode before Win 10 that apps could use to ask “does this user prefer dark mode”. Now it exists in windows as well as iOS, MacOs etc so its a pretty established standard by now to have that as a Boolean system wide (and that system apps follow it while third party apps can query it of course).

Even if dx12 is an arbitrary restriction to only work in w10 that’s beside the point. It’s a feature of win10 no matter how arbitrary.

>>dspill+oj
Yes but no apps (more or less) respected those settings. Yet in OSes with a single dark switch, it was seen as impolite for apps to not respect it. So basically Microsoft copied that. That’s the feature. That there is a switch that apps actually tend to respect. Nothing else. Might sound small or even like a regression from before, but it’s not imo.

>>the_pw+(OP)
I have to disagree with the settings app. When i needed to change, fix, or update something in my parents old computer i always knew exactly where to go there was one central hub that contained every useful permission and setting that i could need to change or update to fix a buggy mouse or alter audio settings/devices etc.

Nowadays it's impossible to know exactly where some specific setting is anymore, and the settings app has been so dumbed down that most settings don't even exist anymore. Just the other day i tried to fix my dads touchpad and went on a wild goose chase through every possible setting location, of which there were too many, and kept coming back to the "settings app" in which the touchpad "settings" had only a single checkbox, fully unrelated to anything actually useful at all. The tab was there but there was no fucking settings in it. Nothing useful at all. In the end i tried driver updates, i tried rollbacks, i tried every setting app, i tried everything and the touchpad still doesnt work. You can click, you can't move, you can't scroll. The man didn't install anything, windows released an update and the single most important tool for interacting with the computer, one that is built into the hardware, was broken with no recourse to fix it, I'm simply not allowed access to the settings i require to maintain my own control over a functioning device.

That is the new settings app to me. Maybe if you stay within the ever shrinking bounds of control that Microsoft so graciously barely allows us to utilize, maybe then the buttons are rounder and the categories are better laid out. But if you need to fix anything that exists even slightly outside that toddler playground Microsoft is only ever making that more and more difficult under the guise of UI "improvements".

>>alkona+gp
there was no system setting for dark mode before Win 10 that apps could use to ask “does this user prefer dark mode”

There was no need for apps to ask that. Previously, apps would just say "draw this dialog box in the user's preferred color scheme" and it would work fine. The only reason this dark mode hint is necessary is because too many apps started ignoring the Windows system color scheme and doing their own thing.

>>tremon+AI
Exactly. Apps ignore anything but a “use dark mode yes or no” option, so the improvement was to add it. Tiny from windows perspective, huge for users (since the apps now actually respect it).

The difference to windows users is that you change a switch and apps actually change whereas before you couldn’t do that.

It wasn’t Microsoft’s fault before and it isn’t they who updated the apps now so they don’t get credit for that. But the fact remains you basically couldn’t use dark mode before and now you can.