Will MS ever get the Start Menu Right?

badrobot · Aug 4, 2021

johnlgalt said:
I have to disagree on this. And I'm sure I'm not even close to the only one.

7 took all of the good things and 'necessary' things (cough UAC cough) from Vista and spun it into a fabric that was much more bearable. Vista was a resource hog, pure and simple. Running 7 and Vista on the same exact rig Vista used more resources and had tremendously more pagefile calls, from what I remember. 7 was smoother, more fluid, and much easier to use. There were definitely people out there who used Vista, and still do, over using 7 - but there was not a 'free' upgrade path from Vista to 7 like there is to 10 and now 11.

If it wasn't for my TechNet subscription, I'd have never been able to update my mom's old DEll desktop from Vista, which it came with, to 7, which ran 100x times better on that machine.

I can agree. But the store didn't change it's layout so much as it changed what you can do to make the layout more familiar to you, or work the way you want it to. The greatest amount of griping is coming from folks who cannot pin folders and have cascading folders from start and from the taskbar. Those who do like Slice N Dice and I do, never even really see the start menu to begin with.

Still, though, I'm not against the start menu being changed to look more retro, or act more retro - as long as I can hit the WinKey and type and start my app.

For the taskbar, though, I do like to have some apps pinned - especially when loading an app from the start menu doesn't allow you to proactively select a particular profile in your browser, or a particular layout in my File manager app. But too many icons on the taskbar gets old.

I used to use an app called Bins, by one of the StarDock developers. It worked great to 10, as recently as ... 2009, IIRC. But then it started having issues.

I now have looked at TaskBarGroups, the original by tjackenpacken and the fork by Pike. I'm using Pike's 2.0 Alpha and loving it - I have pop-up mini taskbars with only the icons in each mini-taskbar group that I want, and have attached 14 different groups totaling well over 70 individual apps to that I can have easy access to them. The vast majority of these are applications that are not 'installed' but, rather portable apps, and opening my file manager to then find the right folder to then run the app was getting old.

An example - the apps I have installed for use with my music collection:

View attachment 4837

I made these more for testing the TBG app than anything, I'll probably get rid of most of them. Probably keep everything to the left of the Notepad++ icon and remove the ones from the right of it.

I have a big issue with clutter. On both my desk and "desktop". Or even in the OS itself. I try to avoid 3rd party utility software as much as possible. It bloats the system. I think, shortcuts in a folder is the purest solution there is. :)

davidvkimball · Aug 4, 2021

jimbo45 said:
Hi there
IMO --OK I might be a Dinosaur but the best Menu for Windows was that in XP -- for those who have never seen or run XP : Here's a screenshot with the Lunar Black theme and using a nice Costa Rican Jaguar pic as desktop image.

Beats any of the W10 and W11 arrangements of start menu !!! Doesn't also take up a whopping amount of Screen real estate either

Cheers
jimbo

You inspired me to make a virtual machine of Windows XP Media Center Edition and install the Zune Desktop theme:

Mystere · Aug 4, 2021

johnlgalt said:
7 took all of the good things and 'necessary' things (cough UAC cough) from Vista and spun it into a fabric that was much more bearable. Vista was a resource hog, pure and simple. Running 7 and Vista on the same exact rig Vista used more resources and had tremendously more pagefile calls, from what I remember. 7 was smoother, more fluid, and much easier to use. There were definitely people out there who used Vista, and still do, over using 7 - but there was not a 'free' upgrade path from Vista to 7 like there is to 10 and now 11.

Vista came in two forms, RTM and SP1. RTM had lots of issues, yes. SP1 fixed most of those. There was not much of a difference between Vista SP1 and Windows 7 RTM. No doubt, Vista was rushed out, and MS was pressured by OEM's to set hardware standards too low. But on decent hardware (high spec at the time it was released, but average hardware when SP1 was out) it ran well.

7 was mostly a skinned Vista SP1. Really. It had a few things that Vista did not, but really the fact everyone found it to be a radically better OS was largely in peoples heads. Recall the Mojave project?

jimbo45 · Aug 5, 2021

davidvkimball said:
You inspired me to make a virtual machine of Windows XP Media Center Edition and install the Zune Desktop theme:

View attachment 4841

Hi there
Another good theme and look at the nice curved title bars -- similar to the Lunar Black theme.

I think you have to agree that if we have a start menu the XP one was the way to do it - and a lot of those nice themes also -- the modern W10/W11 ones look a bit bland and boring beside those old ones -- modern themes don't have to be bland / boring or look like the idance floor e of an early 2000's Moscow Nightclub!!

Cheers
jimbo

barman58 · Aug 5, 2021

I never ran any system with the XP Luna scheme, and I ran a lot of systems for employers at than time, first thing to happen was to disable the ability to use the themes and go back to the Win2K - I'd give the uses a choice of a few colour options to allow for working environments buts that was it

jimbo45 · Aug 5, 2021

barman58 said:
I never ran any system with the XP Luna scheme, and I ran a lot of systems for employers at than time, first thing to happen was to disable the ability to use the themes and go back to the Win2K - I'd give the uses a choice of a few colour options to allow for working environments buts that was it

Hi there
Working from Office computers / Office systems is a different ballgame of course -- you would need reasonable consistency but at home on your own gear choices should be much more available. Even in an office because of people's different vision levels colour changing and font size adjustment should still IMO be user configurable. Mind you now with huge monitors available if you left standard sizes the fonts would on some applications be so tiny as to be unreadable even with 20/20 raptor vision.

On one machine where I used a lot of photoshop (printing A3 and poster A2 sizes for displays etc) I found the best background was simply a plain boring "Light grey" reminiscent of the plain greenish colour of the basick W2K desktop, so it depends really on what your working environment is as well of course but typiclly home users are doing all sorts of things on their machines rather than reserving them for a specific task.

Cheers
jimbo

barman58 · Aug 5, 2021

Jimbo

I have recently finished the switch at home to a 4K, [3840x2160] mostly due to my photo editing workflow.

I have a Main Display 32" HDR, A TV as a second screen also HDR but 43" and a 17" Touchscreen laptop.

I use the large screen to display a full screen image of the image and the 32 for the edit and often the laptop alongside for forums Emails etc

I've not yet tried this setup on Win11 but the major issue I have is that windows 10 support for modern screen setup is abysmal. The system just treats any text as an afterthought unless it's got specific software tweaks to automatically adjust text sizes - if you look at Lightroom as an example the actual lightroom app's text is fine and enlarges to suit the screen, and can be adjusted to suit your needs, [OK 4K on a 17" screen is a little smaller than I'd like but it's a portable device so you need to compromise].

However when you go into the OS screens, the dropdowns on the top bar of the application the text is 1/4 size - I wear glasses to see but having to use my reading glasses to use the screen and then still struggling is not what you expect in professional software.

There are work arounds to adjust the OS font sizes but this is a badly implemented Black art - obviously an afterthought - I'm sure that Adobe could adapt lightroom to display these menus correctly, but they should not have to - hopefully MS will sort it out in W11 - though I doubt it

Winuser · Aug 5, 2021

BunnyJ said:
People get mad because they don't get what they want. That's how life goes.. we don't always get what we want when we want it. MS decided on what they want the OS to look/feel like and how it functions. Do I like it.. yes,, so far I like it and adjusted to the changes from 10.

But then, I like change and I accept it. It's not a deal breaker to me that I can't adjust 11 to death. As long as I can run my apps and the OS looks interesting.. I will use it.

But that's me and as usual, YMMV

I would like to be able to remove the Recommended section. If MS decides not to let us I'll still use the start menu. I'm still have the Taskbar in the center even though we can now move it to the left. I do have to admit that at first I was going to move it.

clam1952 · Aug 5, 2021

Yes that recommended wasted space is a bit annoying, I've got the Win11 Start in the Centre and Open Shell on the left.

Hopefully we will able to tweak things in future builds or after it goes RTM and they have finalised the UI, I suspect it's not fully developed yet.

martyfelker · Aug 5, 2021

I will be curious to see what Stardock will come up with. Start10 was one of the first programs I installed on Win10. I prefer to see the shutdown/restart button on the taskbar. They have a big opportunity here.

johnlgalt · Aug 5, 2021

Mystere said:
Vista came in two forms, RTM and SP1. RTM had lots of issues, yes. SP1 fixed most of those. There was not much of a difference between Vista SP1 and Windows 7 RTM. No doubt, Vista was rushed out, and MS was pressured by OEM's to set hardware standards too low. But on decent hardware (high spec at the time it was released, but average hardware when SP1 was out) it ran well.

7 was mostly a skinned Vista SP1. Really. It had a few things that Vista did not, but really the fact everyone found it to be a radically better OS was largely in peoples heads. Recall the Mojave project?

Sorry, I didn't compare Vista RTM and 7, I compared Vista SP2 + further updates and 7 release (not pre-release / leaks),

You can say it was in my head if you want - but my real world experience says otherwise.

Now, I will agree that more than a few people would probably have had better experiences simply from having a new, cleanly installed OS - that happens a lot. But I tested clean installs of both on the same machine one after the other. And in the case of my Mother's machine It was an upgrade from the latest patched Vista at the time to Windows 7 as an in-place upgrade, so, again, no leaks / betas.

Both systems performed better on 7 than on Vista.

johnlgalt · Aug 5, 2021

badrobot said:
I have a big issue with clutter. On both my desk and "desktop". Or even in the OS itself. I try to avoid 3rd party utility software as much as possible. It bloats the system. I think, shortcuts in a folder is the purest solution there is. :)

My desktop is bare. My taskbar is currently filled with extra shortcut icons that I will be removing, as I mentioned I'm helping test the TBG app for Pike. And, FWIW, this pretty much does exactly what you do but with a bit of automation.

It's a shortcut of a folder full of shortcuts, with the ability to set an icon, or let it randomly pick 4 icons in the folder to make a collage - type icon. Nothing more. And it's open source. So, in my opinion, it's a win-win-win situation.

unifex · Aug 7, 2021

Start Menu is important to me - I don't care what you call it and whether it's in the corner or in the center, but I do need a place where all the software is listed and could be run by clicking on a shortcut. I do not want to search for a program by typing something. In fact, I don't want to search at all (sometimes I do, but very rarely), and so I have the search service disabled (no indexing, no Cortana, etc.).

Now, the problem with the Stat Menu in Windows 10 for me, is that it is a very long list and long lists do not make sense to me. I think that grouping items in folders is much more efficient. However, Windows 10 does not allow cascading folders - I can create a folder in the start menu, but then I can no longer create a folder inside that folder. or rather, I can create it, but Windows 10 will ignore it and show all items as if that last folder was not there. To me that makes no sense.

As far as personalization (customization), the trend since Windows 2K has been to reduce it with every new iteration of Windows. There are only two reasons for that as far as I gather - unification with phones/tablets, i.e. touch devices (which in my opinion is a fools errand) and the general idea that an average user is clueless, hence things should be made easy, hence - remove all decisions from them. The latter however is not just Microsoft, same goes to media, politics, you name it ...

Steve C · Aug 7, 2021

unifex said:
Start Menu is important to me - I don't care what you call it and whether it's in the corner or in the center, but I do need a place where all the software is listed and could be run by clicking on a shortcut. I do not want to search for a program by typing something. In fact, I don't want to search at all (sometimes I do, but very rarely), and so I have the search service disabled (no indexing, no Cortana, etc.).

Now, the problem with the Stat Menu in Windows 10 for me, is that it is a very long list and long lists do not make sense to me. I think that grouping items in folders is much more efficient. However, Windows 10 does not allow cascading folders - I can create a folder in the start menu, but then I can no longer create a folder inside that folder. or rather, I can create it, but Windows 10 will ignore it and show all items as if that last folder was not there. To me that makes no sense.

As far as personalization (customization), the trend since Windows 2K has been to reduce it with every new iteration of Windows. There are only two reasons for that as far as I gather - unification with phones/tablets, i.e. touch devices (which in my opinion is a fools errand) and the general idea that an average user is clueless, hence things should be made easy, hence - remove all decisions from them. The latter however is not just Microsoft, same goes to media, politics, you name it ...

I use Open Shell. I had to set a custom start button to overwrite the default button to enable mouse hover to open Open Shell.

Edwin · Aug 7, 2021

The extent of my Start Menu..., it's all I ever use!

Zardoc · Aug 25, 2021

From Windows 8 to 8.1, people got what they want.

Now if you believe that MS will make all your dreams come true, stop eating those funny gummies :lmao:

. However, it doesn't hurt to share your thoughts on what you like and dislike. Hey you never know, but if you don't say anything to the right people and rant all over the place, well, that's just blowing air and with all the pollution out there keep your air (save your breath), it's a precious commodity.

Colif · Aug 25, 2021

Winuser said:
I would like to be able to remove the Recommended section. If MS decides not to let us I'll still use the start menu.

i wouldn't mind if you could reduce it down to a header so it can pop up if you want to access it but if it was down on bottom row you could see more of the top icons at once. I just overcame that by whittling the shown icons down to a number below where it goes onto a 2nd page

I am not hung up over which start is best, I only use it to close PC and I could right click start to do that... if I ever remember.