total blunder imo but I think most people are just happy it's not as screwed up as whatever the hell Windows8 was
for me personally besides the common complaints just getting to the weather widget is now a huge microannoyance that drives me up the wall
Now they’ve gone and half-baked that design in new software and it’s less intuitive, eg clicking file menu item and a whole new screen appears.
Any other Windows UI even as far back as Windows 1 is better than the piece of hot, useless garbage that was Windows 8.
Flow A: hit a button, a menu with text input and pictures shows up
Flow B: hit a button, a full screen with text input and pictures shows up
A is perfect, and B is "practically unusable".
On a desktop computer. More than likely with (a) monitor(s) big enough to occupy an entire desk.
The Start Screen was fucking horrible all around, and its horribleness was proven with the immediate resurrection of the Start Menu and demise of the Start Screen in Windows 8.1.
Metro also met a similar demise because it forced a black-and-white, no delimiter UI upon desktop computers. Computers equipped with GPUs and monitors capable of rendering billions of colors with huge screen real estate.
Some of Metro's baggage is still with us, but I welcome Windows 11's slow move back towards a colorful Windows UI.
I recall when they did this to Visual Studio.
They completely removed all colors from all of the icons, making it impossible to pick out one from another and making once familiar icons by color a hunt-and-peck operation to find.
It was all just black and white. Then, due to feedback, they relented and put color back on all the icons.
It was madness.
The problem with Visual Studio was the sudden removal of color changed people's "muscle memory" on where certain items were on a complex toolbar or menu system. I have no idea who thought that was a good idea, but some design team decided they were going with it, and they did.
When everything suddenly went black and white, it was impossible to quickly distinguish one thing from the next.
They reverted the decision and suddenly all the colored icons came back and it was once again easier to quickly pick things out.
I mean, people freaked out when they changed just the VS Code icon:
https://visualstudiomagazine.com/blogs/data-driver/2017/10/v...
B can yield a minor mental context switch, with no good reason for doing so.
The most sold app in their crappy app store was a 20USD classic start menu.
Instead, probably because at that time they brought in people with no history in the Windows org to manage the Window org, we got a 10+ year decline of Windows that has accelerated in recent years.
And Win7 barely changed anything.