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Comment by HlessClaudesman | Hacker News Reader

I've been using classic shell to completely ban tiles from my windows experience, it does a good job of returning the interface to more or less windows 7 familiarity.

h̶t̶t̶p̶:̶/̶/̶w̶w̶w̶.̶c̶l̶a̶s̶s̶i̶c̶s̶h̶e̶l̶l̶.̶n̶e̶t̶/̶

I'd be keen to know if anyone else has used this or some other approach to de-candy-ify their desktop.

Edit: thanks so much for the feedback everyone, the hive mind at its best! I learned from the cementers below that classic shell has been abandoned and then forked to a community project here:

https://github.com/Open-Shell/Open-Shell-Menu

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The best thing I have found on both Windows 10 and Android to improve usability is to go into the accessibility or ease of access settings and disable animations. This makes both systems so much snappier and responsive.

On Windows it makes the Start menu fast and comfortable - instead of having some things slide in from one direction and others from another direction, the Start menu just appears instantly. I used to use Start10, but after disabling animation and deleting the tiles I don't need, I'm just as happy with the Windows native Start menu. I mostly just use the type-and-search rather than clicking on icons, so the less fanfare the Start menu presents, the better.

A couple of other settings I like in Windows 10 are also in the ease of access settings under the cursor and pointer section. I changed the cursor thickness to 3 for my high-DPI displays, and found a nice solid black mouse pointer there too - much easier to see than the default white one.

Whatever OS you are on, take a look through the accessibility settings. That is where they hide a lot of the good stuff.

Great tip. The animations never bothered me much, but upon turning it and transparency off, things are so much snappier. I have absolutely no need for them on my work machine.

I’m probably a glut, but I can’t help but like the transparency features even when working.

One complaint I have about macOS is that there is no way to disable animations. There are a couple of options to reduce motion but nothing to totally remove them all.

This is always the first change I make on every new OS install I use... all of them. And in every app and web app that lets me do it.

* I neither need or want every little thing to be animated. It just distracts me and slows me down. *

Android I've turned all the devtools animations scale settings down to 0x to disable pretty much everything.

Only a few browsers support it and even less websites respect it but you can set your browser to "reduced motion" mode some websites will stop using animations.

https://caniuse.com/#search=prefers-reduced-motion

I especially hate the smooth text cursor movement in Microsoft Word, where it even animated the movement as you type characters - I find it really off-putting. Thankfully, disabling animations, as you describe, also disables this "feature".

Annoyingly, after some Windows updates this setting is reverted though.

Yes, that cursor animation is just awful. What kind of User Experience Designer thought it was a good idea to take a discrete event - typing a character or using a cursor key - and turn it into a laggy animation? No other application does this. It's simply a ridiculous idea.

Adding insult to injury, Word has a "Provide feedback with animation" checkbox in the Word Options/Ease of Access panel. But turning off this checkbox does nothing! You still get the animations unless you turn off the systemwide animation setting.

Wait, there is another application that does this, and it's even worse: Excel. By default, Excel animates the cell selection border even if you click on another cell far away. Yes, it starts an animation at the cell you were on and animates it all the way to the cell you clicked on. This is incredibly stupid: when I click on a cell, that is the cell my attention is on. I don't care about the cell that was previously selected, or seeing an animation go diagonally or whatever direction from there to the cell I clicked. Why in the world did anyone think this animation was helpful?

Excel also does not respond to the systemwide animation disable, but thankfully it does have the animation checkbox like Word in its own options panel, and that one works.

Disabling animations in Android can have some surprising æffects. For me the little "car" in Lyft/Uber refuse to budge without closing & reopening the app. Some status indicators go haywire too (like loading bubbles in youtube, and fake frequency histograms in music apps).

My laptop disables animations in low power mode and ironically that makes it feel faster than "performance" mode.

I've used it for a long while, from windows 8 to last summer on windows 10. Works great.

After a warning that classicshell was discontinued I finally decided last summer to make the switch and use the windows 10 menu; remove the full app list always appearing, remove all the "magic tiles", put small sized tiles for my app grouped by categories and using the stack system (several tiles in one).

Works decently (well enough that I can fit all I want in a single menu view, no need to scroll), and at least it's supported by windows so I don't risk losing it randomly some day.

My major remaining issue is how broken the search is, open start menu, start to type and it searches but I have no idea what kind of broken search algorithm can possibly gives such terrible results, perfect match are sometimes not shown, things that barely match fill the top of the list ... I know alternative exists but I don't see why I would need that here, it's just sad. I disabled all the web search features that made things even worse.

The modern windows 10 start menu can be made usable again, but it really feels like a case of you guys needs to go back to the basics instead of trying to fix the fix of the fix of what doesn't work. Throw it away, start again.

> at least it's supported by windows so I don't risk losing it randomly some day.

Hah, good one!

Eh, I mean the core things aren't removed often. Previous menu did hold from 95 to 2012 (windows 8), so it's rather long lived. And the new worst one they came up with is still there now 7 years later.

Can't really call it "unreliable" when they change it once in more than 20 years, in computer time that's eternity.

In my experience administering an office full of Windows 10 PCs, I wouldn't call any part of that system reliable. Every major update seems to change something in unpredictable ways. Using Enterprise helps a lot, but it's still a pain.

windows 10 search is straight broken, tries to give me web results most of the time. only reason i use it is habit from using spotlight on mac.

There are really bad problems with search, but sometimes it is just enough to type in/remove a single letter. I think that's a mechanism for you to be able to pick between options without the need to stop typing your keyword.

I actually quite like the Windows 10 start menu, at least after removing all the default tiles for games and what-not and replacing them with things I actually use.

Totally with you on the broken search functionality though - it didn't work in Windows 7, and it still doesn't work. I literally have no idea how such a core feature of the world's most popular desktop OS can be so horribly broken for so long... but it is!

It seems like Classicshell has been abandoned by the developer. It's a bit surprising to me that it still works considering Windows 10's rapid pace of development, so I hope it keeps working for the foreseeable future.

As for myself, I've sort of given up on the start menu. The search function is finally decent enough again that I can mostly rely on being able to type only a few characters before it finds the program I need. so I can generally ignore the tiles entirely.

See Open Shell: https://github.com/Open-Shell/Open-Shell-Menu

I'm using a OSS fork call Openshell.

The Windows 10 menu is terrible, OpenShell is the second thing i install on my Windows machine(s).

What's the first?

Another web browser I bet

A proper terminal https://conemu.github.io

>I'd be keen to know if anyone else has used this or some other approach to de-candy-ify their desktop.

I have been using Classic/Open-shell from W8.x onwards.

I use O&O Shutup10, not particularly to de-candify but for tweaks and performance improvements. It does the heavy-lifting by disabling services, making registry and group policy edits for Telemetry, Security, Privacy etc. It also stops a lot of UI/UX annonyances and dark-patterns, clawing back some useful bandwidth.

https://www.oo-software.com/en/shutup10

I don't remember the last time I really used the start menu. My normal workflow on Windows is the same as on iOS:

Focus or open the search box ("Windows-Key" on Windows, or swipe-down on iPhone X) and type the program I'd like to start. Works pretty well on both systems, and normally the first letters are sufficient.

That's what i used to do until it was not possible to disable the bing search anymore. This + the fact that searching for a program was quite inaccurate (it will sometime not find it, or do weird stuff like "not" will find notepad, "note" wouldn't, "notep" will find it again). I found myself opening edge all the times searching for things i don't want to search with a search engine i don't want to use. I never found a way to disable this advertisement for bing.

That was the nail on the coffin that made me change operating system and I really don't miss windows 10.

The best thing is when 1 out of 7 times, it displays the "uninstall" link for the application instead of the application.

I have bing search disabled, so it is still possible, but don't ask me how I did it. The Problem you describe still persists, though. So it seems to not really be related to bing search that they totally fucked up the start menu search. It's a disgrace how bad it is.

To be honest, i had managed to disable it prior to some of the big updates. After having to reinstall windows from a newer medium including those updates, i wasn't able to disable it anymore. From memory, it was just an option in the start menu settings that has been removed now.

I dimly remember it being more involved for me than that and probably included group policies + registry. But it is gone for now and has not come back with updates. I am not sure I ever do a new install of windows 10 on my home PC should the need arise. For me, the signs point to Linux more with every new "feature" MS builds into Windows 10 and the only thing really holding me back still is gaming.

Also, it frequently manages to find a new, undesired, match just as you're about to click the the thing you actually wanted, thus repositioning the tiles and causing you to launch the wrong thing.

This is what happens when you let WebDevs work on your UI.

I don't know how many times I've needed to fix something with a user's display settings and hit Windows Key and started typing the word "display", only to end up with an app recommendation instead of the damn system settings! Oddly, if I just delete the last letter and search "displa", I usually get what I wanted. Windows 10 is so very frustrating.

I've created a dozen or so of entries myself in the HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\App Paths registry key and i also got a few in the taskbar.

For instance to start firefox i can do windows-key + 1 (taskbar) or windows-key+r+ ff + enter (app path registry key)

I just unpin all tiles from the Start menu, that is all.

Really don't get the fuzz, thre are plenty of Powershell scripts floating around if one wants to automate it instead of doing a couple of right mouse clicks.

I'm ad tolerant but ads being baked into my OS feels weird and wrong.

Not everyone knows how to remove them, and really why should they have to remove them?

For me it feel the same way as Amiga bundles, just in digital format instead of a pile of floppies.

http://www.amigahistory.plus.com/bundles.html

If Windows 10 were free, then tolerating a certain amount of this bullshit would be acceptable. But it isn't free.

It was free for XP, 7, 8 and 8.1 users.

Plus every new release since then.

well I had been using LiteStep to modify my Desktop sine late 98. Sadly Windows 8 was partly incompatible and Windows 10 fully so. I made the switch to Kubuntu and am very happy with Plasma.

Used to LOVE LiteStep, used it until Windows 7, since I actually preferred it over any LS setup I'd used. Will have to check out Plasma... next machine will be a hackintosh or linux (if I can't get macos working well enough).

Thanks for this suggestion !

Since I've switched to win10, I've been mostly regretting the sober XP-style greyish toolbars (I could have it on Win7 but not 10 anymore). Any ideas ? Can Open-Shell make that ?

Anyways, I feel the Windows UI has become less and less productive, it's striking.

Just to clarify, do you mean that you've been missing the classic theme? Windows 10 doesn't have it, so it's not possible to regret using it.

Well yes, I'm missing the classic theme (not being a native english speaker I don't quite get the difference).

I like the UI to be as sober and straightforward as possible.

To miss something is to wish it were true again. I miss Momma; I wish I could see her again.

To regret something you've done is to wish it had not happened. I regret calling him stupid.

Opposites, really.

Allright, thanks.

> h̶t̶t̶p̶:̶/̶/̶w̶w̶w̶.̶c̶l̶a̶s̶s̶i̶c̶s̶h̶e̶l̶l̶.̶n̶e̶t̶/̶

Seems that you copied this link with some Unicode underline characters included or something. It looks really weird in Safari on iOS 12.

Clickable link: http://www.classicshell.net/

I use Start10 by Stardock (Start8 previously) and it's been alright. The search is somewhat flaky with results but it does the job.

I use a combination of Open Shell, Launchy and Search Everything as my workflow. Works pretty well for me.

I use xfce to pretty much guarantee I'll never need to worry about my DE being candyified in the first place.

> or some other approach to de-candy-ify their desktop.

It's called Linux.

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