Solved Do You Use A Third Party Start Menu?

hdmi said:

It's not that important IMO, as background pictures can also help to make it look nicer. I ditched TranslucentTB because Open-Shell has taskbar opacity and taskbar texture, which works well if you use ExplorerPatcher to bring back the Windows 10 taskbar on Windows 11.

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That looks nice

Hi,
Yep explorer patcher does just fine for basic win-10 start menu just showing all apps.
Something 11 should be able to do but doesn't.

Jose Hidalgo said:

@hdmi in my case I have also icons on the desktop, which would be a problem with full menu transparency.
On Win 7 with Classic Shell, this wasn't a problem. The menu was just opaque enough (see the icons below?):

View attachment 89432

On Win 11 I have yet to find this kind of semi-opaqueness on my Open-Shell start menu. And I won't be using another start menu because I just like Open-Shell for that purpose.

BTW sorry for the question, but why bring back Win 10 taskbar on Win 11? I don't even know what ExplorerPatcher is, so...

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I started using ClassicShell when it was still an early beta on Windows 7. (Ivo Beltchev is called Ivo on Sevenforums.com and as a matter of fact I'm the guy whose forum signature on there references Ivo. lol) AFAIK Microsoft got rid of Aero glass with the release of Windows 8 because Aero glass was being perceived by many as "proof" that Microsoft were too obsessed with stuff that was sacrificing more processing power in exchange for only cosmetics, i.e. as opposed to Microsoft spending more effort on improving the OS in ways that could have had a more positive impact on productivity factors and overall "true" quality of the OS. There was considerable backlash about this back then, and comments sections below tech articles online everywhere were rife with it. On average, for the most part, Windows 8 felt generally slicker, more responsive than Windows 7.

To clarify, I was an early adopter of Windows 8, and I stayed on Windows 8.1 until the beginning of 2018, but I also kept a close eye on how Windows 10 was evolving during the second half of this whole period. So, at the beginning of 2018, I moved to Windows 10, and I stopped using ClassicShell because I was aware that there were incompatibility problems between these two, but I didn't start using Open-Shell until Windows 11 came out, which was some time after Open-Shell had all its wrinkles already ironed out.

As for ExplorerPatcher, it's a free open source software on GitHub. Bringing back the Windows 10 taskbar lets me continue to:

• use my taskbar toolbars and the scripts I wrote myself to automate them, and that make them play a rather important role in my workflow.
• keep all my notification area icons always visible excepting only when in fullscreen mode.
• have smaller icons both on the taskbar and in the notification area thereof, and have narrower spacing between notification area icons, to see a MUCH clearer overview of icons and to prevent icon overflow. (With all due respect to the visually impaired, who else besides them needs icons shown on the taskbar to be bigger than a house? I mean, Belgium is a small country. I only have a 55 inch TV so, I don't want taskbar icons to be THAT much taller than the Space Needle in Seattle. )
• have the taskbar height reduced to a noticeably smaller minimum height to make it not waste too much screen estate. See above. (But when you do, please be careful not to hurt your neck...)
• see undistracting horizontal lines below icons of opened apps as opposed to have nightmares from getting abducted by wiener sausages.
• use Open-Shell to customize the clock's font color, i.e. to make the clock's moving seconds undistracting.
• avoid various bugs that still affect the Windows 11 taskbar.
• ...

DigitalGoat said:

No 3rd party start menu for me either, tbh I don't interact with the start menu at all anyway.
I use blender & Gimp a lot and that is nearly all keyboard shortcuts for an efficient workflow, the habit continues into Windows so the start menu is pretty redundant for me for the most part.
Most of the software I use runs in full screen mode so what Windows looks like doesn't matter much to me.

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Interesting point of view!

I'm currently trying Satrdock Start11

Open-Shell with SAB..............BEST !!

Jose Hidalgo said:

On Win 11 I have yet to find this kind of semi-opaqueness on my Open-Shell start menu. And I won't be using another start menu because I just like Open-Shell for that purpose.

BTW sorry for the question, but why bring back Win 10 taskbar on Win 11? I don't even know what ExplorerPatcher is, so...

Click to expand...

ExplorerPatcher brings back assorted features that MS in its wisdom chose to drop from Win 11. It allows choosing between Win10 and Win11 Start Menu and Task Bar. What I love is that it lets me put the task bar where I want it: vertical task bar on the left side of the screen. All who use it are grateful to Valentin Radu, a Romanian software engineer who developed it. It’s a free utility which you can find at: Releases · valinet/ExplorerPatcher (github.com)