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Comment by raxxorrax | Hacker News Reader

People told me it was habit, but the Windows 7 start menu eats the new crap alive. Sometimes it just doesn't even work on Windows 10. Clicking an app just doesn't do anything. If the link is invalid, you don't even get an error, but it randomly happens to any app. It is complete junk. For many months Windows wasn't able to sort icons on the desktop on multiple monitor setups.

So forgive me if my enthusiasm of this message is slightly dampened.

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Agreed. I considered, and still consider, Microsoft in the 80s through the late-90s to be excellent at UI/UX. Windows 2000 was the pinnacle for good UI, and Windows 7 with the Classic UI mode was the best it ever got.

Microsoft has abandoned most of their own principles (and they were good principles) of UI developed in those days, and now everything seems to be designed by a committee of schizophrenic art school dropouts.

Microsoft seems to be hungover from whatever they were doing with tablets about 10 years ago. They might be coming around to the fact that people don't want every computer to behave like a tablet.

They have the main idea correctly. Two UI's that change depending on the mode of operation. A dense one for keyboard & mouse, and a more spaced-out for touch mode. All of their apps should be like MS office that changes density when you go from mouse to touch mode.

I just use Open Shell as a start menu replacement. Works perfectly for me, and I have it configured to behave like the Windows 7 start menu. The Windows 10 start menu being cumbersome wasn't enough to push me to it; it was that the Windows 10 start menu had a limit to the number of items on it, and if I remember correctly didn't show any new programs after that limit, which made it useless for opening any newly installed programs after that.

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