Windows Start Menu not starting? You're not alone

I'm not one of the anti-Microsoft brigade. My livelihood depends on Azure, and Windows is my daily driver...

BUT... Windows 11 is a bag of spanners. It seems to not really work properly. Tablet mode doesn't work anymore, so I can't really use a pen. Various bits seem to be slow, such as the scrolling in the file explorer - it may be an attempt at better animation timings - it doesn't make sense really. My SD card reader doesn't seem to work. There are a lot of things that are just worse than they have ever been.

Windows 11 seems to be a significant step backwards for no apparent benefit. I switch between Windows 10 (dev desktop) and Windows 11 (home laptop), and really cannot get on with Windows 11. I am genuinely stumped at how they could have produced something so regressive and, months after release, is still a bit shit.

Many years ago, I realized that Microsoft did not want anyone to use the Start Menu. I switched to Classic Shell (now Open Shell) and never looked back. Yes, I would recommend this to a friend -- even my mother.

http://www.classicshell.net/

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

I have a home laptop which had a just purchased new install of windows 10 on it until I was pretty much forced to upgrade to win 11. I am very disgruntled now, as my HDMI port (To my big screen TV) began to fail soon after the upgrade (Dell 1640 XPS laptop.. Do not buy). Soon thereafter my TV began restarting a lot as well because the screen brightness kept varying wildly and the audio now has pops in it whenever I stream video and multi-task on both screens.

Other MAJOR frustrations is that the screen background cannot be matched when extending the display, the calendar does not show when I click the time/date displayed o the taskbar, task manager is no longer accessible by right clicking the taskbar, and worst of all, the task bar cannot be adjusted to a different position on screens -- I used to always set my taskbar to the top to recall the NT era. I also, as with every windows upgrade had to look up correct (new) drivers for all of my hardware components, as windows driver finder has never worked smoothly... ever.... in history.

These wild changes cannot be simple mistakes or oversight in such a large company with so many employees so much experience in OS development. The only reason why these kinds of frustrations occur in my opinion is that MSFT is trying to implant a reason to update to their next OS, because right now, the only other place anyone can go is Linux (Which won't run all the apps I already bought/need) or to Mac (I have tried Apple, I don't like Apple, It's really not for me, Thanks I'll just suffer instead).

I'll probably also need a new laptop by the time win 12 or whatever comes out, and a new TV for strange reasons. :/

I don't mind this kind of passing bugs in win11 which, as trust breaking as they are, also easily go away. What kills me with 11 (and 10 afaik) is the cpu and ram consumption of the system itself. Antivirus / antimalware randomly spike and make the whole system slow. Logging in sometimes takes a whole minute for what I assume is checking stuff with azure ad. This is the kind of stuff that I would love to see fixed, and at the same time know will never be. Resource consumption of the OS doesn't seem to be a priority and that's a shame. Meanwhile even a default install of Ubuntu is much leaner and makes you forget the os, while being much more consistent.

(side note, win ui is also very clunky and you can easily identify all the generations of OSs since XP by using just the right click menu and the settings windows. Tells something about attention to details, you clearly see a pm in a subteam with a concept, rather than a consistent overall experience )

I had similar issue on Windows 10, so not sure if only 11 is affected. (After startup whole startbar was frozen and internet as well for 20-30 minutes). Reinstalling windows helped but only until all updates were installed.

No idea if the issue still persists, I switched to Qubes OS already.

I ran into this last week and found a thread somewhere that resolved it for me. I can't find the link but it was a PowerShell command that enumerated all of the packages on the system and reregistered them. I wonder if it was related to this issue.

Does anybody here know how many devs/man-hours are assigned to what on the Windows OS? As with Twitter & Google, I believe that Microsoft spends exponentially more on implementing data collection, organisation & analysis, (i.e. monetising everything you do), than on actual user-facing features.

Hence the notable lack of functionality/features with the big-tech companies, (given the sheer amount of dev-hours consumed), because they spent at-least 100 hours designing and implementing the storage & analysis systems for the new data points a new feature creates).

Meanwhile it‘s still pure luck if you can open the calendar or if it will take 20s to open with all the days missing. (Windows 11, calendar from the taskbar clock) - Windows 11 just doesn‘t like to open menus from the taskbar it seems ;)

Windows 11 has been very sloppy. I’ve never seen a version of Windows with so many easily reproducible bugs.