I still can't believe how buggy the start menu has been since Windows 8, released TEN YEARS ago.
"Oh, you dragged something over the top of a network drive in Explorer, let me waste the next 3-5 minutes trying to connect to that drive for you". Or how about this: "Oh you plugged in a USB drive that was setup as a live CD? Let me crash for a second and mash your MBR to bits".
How is Windows still mostly garbage at this point?
Searching for such a simple thing in the control panel was infuriating to say the least. I finally found it, random clicking in every potential places and it was in the most unintuitive place you could think of.
You would expect "keyboard layout" search to bring helpful results but it does not.
Most likely he was hitting alt+space by accident which cycles through them without him realizing.
Hot take: I feel like a lot of Windows issues people raise are actually user errors/accidents, then blaming the OS for it.
And who gets to be the judge of which keybinds are "random and mysterious"? Every single OS has it's own different keybinds you need to learn if you want to be eficient with. MacOS has different. KDE has different. Gnome has different. Windows has different. It's not their fault you don't know them or haven't bothered to look into them for the OS you daily drive at home or at work and remain "random and mysterious" to you. Every switch to a new OS involves a certain learning curve for any user.
It's called basic computer literacy in my country and it's also must have knowledge for most white collar jobs as it's part of the curriculum out of high-school.
If you don't have the basic skills to Google "hotkey keyboard layout switch Windows" or something along those lines for your OS, then "you'd better get used to asking people if they want fries with their order", as our instructor used to say, since you're not getting into any tech career if you can't google basic stuff.
> that nobody asked for
As a multilingual person who has to type in 3 languages on daily basis, the keybinds to quickly switch languages are defiantly something I would have asked for and I'm glad they exist.
Still a thousand times better of an experience than Windows.
Between Wine frontends and Steam, I haven't really booted Windows for almost a year now, and I play a healthy balance of modern and ancient games of every production quality.
The only thing I miss is ShareX, which is a screenshot tool that seems to have been designed with me exactly as its sole target audience, because it is incredible, intuitively discoverable and packed with features that Just Work. Yes, Linux also has some screenshot tools, but they are at most 1% of what ShareX is. (And it doesn't work under Wine :(... )
Now I'm even considering FreeBSD as I friggin' love that OS. It's rock solid, predictable, and fast. I just need to make sure a few things can be made to work, even if it's via the browser, like Zoom.
switched to Arch (EndeavourOS KDE/Plasma) and life is sane again; enjoyable, even!
i do miss Affinity products, tho, which cannot even run in Wine/Proton :(
Or if you had enough space, still waste minutes copying the deleting the file...
that 'save to temp-dir first and copy later' behavior is so frustrating because it's inconsistently applied and not easily avoided, yet somewhat incomprehensible to the average user.
Those days ended in 2007. I don't know if that issue persisted after XP because I've never experienced it.
Tracking: it’s mandatory!
Now, my new TV has an interface where if press the favorites list button and don't touch anything, it times out and closes. The problem is, if I keep scrolling through the favorite channels, it still closes after this timeout. How long has the Favorite Channels menu been around on TVs - 40 years? I can't believe they still can't get it right.
That my friend, is the logic you are using.
Just like in Linux, you have your choice of a bunch of different start menus made by all kinds of people and companies. Always had - even in the win3.0 days you could replace the shell variable in win.ini with whatever exe you wanted. Heck, you can make windows look like a mac interface if you want.
There are features and choices microsoft makes as a default, and they don't fit yours or my requirements. They do however fit the requirements of an edgy teen who does most his computing on a cell phone, a soccer mom who thinks deleting a webmail email will get rid of the out of space message on her PC, and the priests who only know how to launch a browser for looking up underage gay porn.
Microsoft did not make the start menu for you, they made if for the largest portion of their target market. Because people like you can easily change it, and people like them would have trouble using a computer at all otherwise.
Where this analogy falls apart is that the favourites menu on TVs hasn't always been implemented by the same people, Microsoft is always the one (re)implementing the start menu - they should have figured out how to not screw it up this badly by now
i hope we can agree that if functionality was not a priority while reimplementing, it should not replace a working product.
Open Shell (formerly Classic Shell) is a godsend that restores some semblance of sanity to the Start menu, but I'm not sure if it's compatible with Windows 11.
https://github.com/Open-Shell/Open-Shell-Menu/discussions/74...
TL;DR - it's mostly working with some outstanding bugs and some users giving workarounds in that thread
Surely adding a shortcuts on the desktop obliviates the need to use it. All of my programs add one automatically so it's super easy.