Just use Open-Shell and let Microsoft's GUI designers, who clearly have nothing productive to do all day, screw around until someone with a brain at Microsoft realizes they can save money by letting them all go.

I'm using startallback to fix the start menu and that irritating right click behavior.

From the outside it appears as if Microsoft is constantly taking the "underdog" stance, that they need to play 'catch-up' with other designs, rather than accept their stance as the de facto industry leader (with the largest market share) and comfortably accept their own design legacy. They seem to constantly believe that someone "else" is doing it better, leading the charge towards State of the Art, and therefore they must change and grow to meet this competitive demand.

It is a stance of paranoia, it seems. Instead of saying "Yes, our Start button is in the left hand bottom corner, it works a certain way, and that *is* Windows", they look at their entire consumer experience as 'necessary to adapt' to some future challenger. So we, the users, constantly experience Microsoft's experimentation because they feel it is absolutely necessary in order to remain competitive.

As if they don't own the desktop (those of you who doubt, look at factual usage demographics and get back to me).

So, instead of kaisen Microsoft seems to constantly chase a theoretical brass ring, lest they get "left behind" in some way or fashion. Microsoft is therefore maintaining a "young tech" attitude regardless of the fact they they are comfortably in first place, and many of their products have been so for a long, long time. They keep trying to reinvent the wheel, when most people ride in Microsoft cars and don't need new wheels, only a tire change when they wear out.

"Jensen Harris, who was UX director at Microsoft for almost six years"

So, eh, is he the one to blame for Win10's shit Start button/menu? And whatabout all the ribbons in everything? Not to mention the whole "charms" fiasco. That's all UX stuff, innit?

So, eh, is Jensen really the Messiah for this article, or just a very naughty boy?

I'm not the Messiah! Will you please listen? I am not the Messiah, do you understand?! Honestly!

When the guy who did Ribbons & the Win10 start menu says you've made an ugly UI - that should hurt; and you should re-evaluate your life decisions.

It's actually worse than that. He was the UX director after the ribbon UI was introduced. He was responsible for the Metro UI.

He's very pround of the Ribbon, Metro etc. - see https://jensenharris.com/

I therefore suspect his criticism of W11 UI is more because it isn't an evolution of his work, ie. he has sour grapes about the way Metro and W8 and the team responsible were discarded.

"Jensen Harris, who was UX director at Microsoft for almost six years"

No relation to Jenson Button

Usually they should learn from the past mistakes, don't they?

From my point of view: Start in the middle, OPTIONAL, would have been fine. If they would actually place it in the middle, and not let it wander around depending on the number of tasks you have open. If only the "run" Window would appear near the start button. (etc etc etc, you know the long lists of complains)

Windows 8 was an excellent touch UI - and it's clear how much research and design went into - Windows 10 and 11 used on a tablet aren't so easy and comfortable to use. What Windows 8 UI was not was a desktop UI, and when the device wasn't a tablet or in tablet mode, the UI should have switched back to something alike Windows 7.

Windows has really some talented designers and UI developers - the issue is those managing the OS looks not to have a whole, comprehensive view of user needs, and every time they chase a different Grail.

Not it looks they are obsessed with something looking like a web/phone UI. - so they have started to hide commands around the UI. You can't see a "Windows look & feel" anymore. Microsoft should listen less to its detractors, no matter loud they are, and "Start" to keep care of its long time users.

They are learning from past mistakes. They find the things people hate, and elevate them. they find the bits people find useful, and remove them.

Each iteration is even worse than the previous..

"How can they achieve such greatness ? Because they are standing on the shoulders of giants...

How come all the common sense speakers from Microsoft always manage to keep all that common sense to themselves till they actually leave?

They are not heard.

Check those many "I told you so" stories, including reading the comments for even more of those, at [1]Who me and [2]On Call

[1] https://www.theregister.com/Tag/who-me

[2] https://www.theregister.com/Tag/On-Call

On Linux / BSD we can get away from terrible UI systems like Gnome 3+ or KDE 4+ by resorting to the terminal and a thin window manager.

Its getting to the point where I do the same thing on Windows. In shell:startup I have a batch file that does taskkill explorer.exe and opens a full screen command prompt. (As a bonus this gets rid of a fair amount of Microsoft's telemetry).

KDE 5.25 is fantastic.

Normally when you tick a box that makes something go away it disappears, but not in MS start menu, you can turn off recommendations but you still have the word Recommendations and the some text explaining you can add it back, taking up a third of the start menu for no benefit.

They just don't get I want gone to mean gone, not hanging round like a bad smell to remind you they know better. They whole thing is a mistake like windows 8 and should be backed out.

The central position is useful if you have an Ultrawide screen but not so useful for the other 99% of Windows users.

And why is there no real customisation and removing basic functionality like having the tool bar where you like? It all feels half finished.

Feedback seems to work about as well as complaining to BT.

> It all feels half finished.

I said that once too, but I had to correct myself to "nearly quarter finished".

To quote Hermes in Futurama... "Now then, while many of you do half-assed jobs, and the rest do jobs whose ass ratio ranges from 42 to a mere 11 percent..."

>The central position is useful if you have an Ultrawide screen

Not really...

Screen in sleep mode, so we touch the spacebar or move the mouse to wake things up; where is the mouse and where is it in relation to the start button?

With a conventional start button location in one corner, I can move the mouse in that general direction, knowing that when the screen lights up the mouse will be close to that corner, so only a small area of screen for the eyes to scan followed by a small hand movement for final alignment and click.

I remember the first time I was obliged to use Windows and I wanted to shut the awful thing down. I was told to use the “start” menu. I couldn’t believe it. Still can’t, but there is and always was an alternative to being subjected to such idiocy. Hint. It begins with M.

Again this old idiocy? Where do you go to start a shutdown? :-P Would you have liked another button called "Stop"? Since invoking a shutdown is not a frequent command - why clutter the UI, and maybe have the user click it by mistake? They could have called it the "Do" button, the "Command button", the "Logo button" (if they had just put Windows logo there), and so on - what would have been different? "Start" was just a name as in "start here".

For the matter you can also select the Desktop and press Alt+F4.... or Ctrl+Alt+Del and then select the Shutdown button...

On Linux (most distros, GNOME excluded) it's just the application menu or main menu, if you like those terms better.

The Start menu was never Microsoft's idea in the first place - they nicked it from Apple's System 7, where its simplicity was perfect; for Windows 95. Then they made it progressively worse under subsequent versions of Windows and subsequent UI bosses... oh hang on.....

Rather than use the Start button, ie by clicking on the button with a mouse, isn't it far easier to just hit the Windows Key on the keyboard, start typing the 1st few letters of whatever you are looking for, it usually comes along as 1st item on the list, then hit the enter key...

It's around 98% proficient and almost makes the Start menu invisible, which kind of makes Harris' point mute.

It would be great if we had some kind of interface where you just need to type the name of the program you want to run. We could call it something like, oh I don't know, a command line, or something like that?

When I complain about never being able to find the app I want to launch on one of Microsoft's crappy new start menus, I frequently get told "just type the name of the app". I usually answer "didn't we do that back in the DOS days?", usually followed by a blank stare. Leave it to Microsoft to spend 30 years inventing the command line interface.

I frequently get told "just type the name of the app". I usually answer "didn't we do that back in the DOS days?

No, we didn't, because we had first to be sure that the PATH contained the program directory, then you had to know the full name of the program, not just the first 2 or 3 letters.. And also in those days we had very few programs compared to what we have now..

The capacity to use TAB completion came much much later.

Yes, that's why all *nix application have names three letters long or typing becomes too tedious - and you get unpronounceable names from which you can't never tell what they actually do...

Moreover there's a namespace issue - you would need to ensure every application has a different name, or you have to type a whole path to launch it.

If you like you can run an application from the taskbar "address" bar (for a very long time...), without having a command line windows floating around - but it needs the full path - if the application is not in the PATH.

Or using Win+R, of course - and GUI were designed by people tired of CLI....

which kind of makes Harris' point mute.

Aaargh :)

Moot.

Not "mute".

> isn't it far easier to just hit the Windows Key on the keyboard, start typing the 1st few letters of whatever you are looking for

I want to run disk management...

So Windows key and type 'Disk'

Oh look with W10 it offers the option to search the web for disk management, no sign of the diskmgmt.msc

So lets continue to type, once again "Disk management" doesn't cause W10 to offer the control.

It is only when I have fully typed in "diskmgmt.msc" does W10 offer me the option to actually run the control.

Just one of many instances where W10 search fails to find and offer tools that have been part of Windows since wayback.

Repeat search for 'disk' on W7 and Diskmgmt.msc is the third (local) program in the search results...

"to make 'S' and 't' align beautifully for the word 'Start'"

Well, that's just fine and dandy for English, but what about the rest of the universe?

I assume that if the ligature aligns well for 'Start', then it would align equally well for 'Stavromula Beta' -- so your point is...? ;)

The Start button wasn't localized, at least in Windows versions I've seen.

The centre piece seemed to want to emulate the Mac ui.

I mean while im not a fan of the default options its not too hard to make it similar to win10

It's pretty easy to swap the alignment of the taskbar from centre to left. Would be nice if we could get it as part of a group policy though.

There are adverts in Windows lock screen?

I can honestly say I've never seen one. (And yes I do use Windows.)