I've run into the search issue as well, and resolved it by tweaking some options in "Adjust the appearance and performance of Windows". I believe it was the "Animations in the taskbar" option, but I'm not 100%.
Flux also destroys your framerate when it transitions. I tend to just launch it when I need it and set it to always be tinted.
The touch and pen support is fantastic, though, and has become second nature to me for web browsing and note taking.
I've also more or less been able to recreate a Linux-like development workflow with Windawesome[0], cmder[1], chocolatey[2], and qutebrowser[3]. Msys in cmder gives me the unix-like terminal I need while still being able to run Windows-native utilities, and things I install from chocolatey like git, ag, and vim are added to the cmder PATH and just work. Bash for Windows has been quite nice as well.
[0] https://windawesome.codeplex.com/ [1] http://cmder.net/ [2] https://chocolatey.org/ [3] https://qutebrowser.org