This makes little sense without saying what an "expert mode" is. What is "geek settings turned on?". You can already configure ~everything and more via the windows registry or gpedit.msc. There are thousands of "expert settings" apps and special iso-s for anyone wanting more user friendly tweaking. Any OS that is enterprise-ready does not need any "I'm geek" checkbox.
It's called the registry. A very long linked list data structure designed to scare experts into using another OS. This process takes time as despair finally wins against hope.
This is what I find the most annoying thing about Windows. Without the expert mode when you have a problem there is no easy way to figure out what is wrong. You google for the symptoms of the problem and all kinds of suggestions and "recipes" turn up. You quickly realize that nobody known anything either. Instead of getting to the root of the problem and applying a precise fix, you have to resort to trying all those "recipes" one by one hoping that you stumble across the one that fixes your problem.<p>So, by not having an "expert" mode in Windows, Microsoft made Windows neither newbie-friendly nor expert-friendly.
This was DOS back in the day, no?<p>TBH I wouldn't overly mind a version of Windows that really was just a terminal on top of the kernel, with the option to use the Windows shell or whatever other shell I want or build one if that's what I desired. Much like that most proselytized of Linux distros. It would still be Windows, but I would feel in control of it to some degree.<p>But it would have to be something other than PowerShell, and I think that's a nonstarter for Microsoft.
He's wrong. We do need an expert mode, at least to remove UAC in a simple way and allow us to mess around at will.<p>Let's see, UAC is nice for your grandmother who might click on something that it shouldn't, yet, we, advanced users are constantly annoyed by those cof,cof "security" features who get in the way when doing something.<p>Yet, your grandmother will eventually get ransomware or malware despite the UAC and other features, so, what's the point!??!<p>At the moment I just remember UAC, but there are plenty of features that we want to turn off with a simple button and we can't, unless we play around with the registry or 3rd party apps.<p>And this is why power users love Linux, we can do whatever we want, if we break it, it's fine and we can learn with it. At this rate, your computer will no longer be "your" computer, Microsoft will own it and you will like it.
I asked for basically the opposite of this for MS Office products. I use Excel for specific purposes, and it would really make it more usable if I could easily hide a bunch of features (especially alternate click context menus that I accidentally engage during the middle of a <i>huge</i> select or copy-paste sequence, requiring me to start over). While still having those unused features available via some drop-down menu.
I completely agree that there are different types of expertise, but I'd expect experts to know their own expertise and not touch parts of a hypothetical "expert mode" outside their particular expertise.
If Windows could’ve been dialed back to be as not manipulative as it was at the time of the post’s writing (ie 2k & XP), I would be glad to hold the temptation to self-claim as an expert.