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If you have to search for it - you have to know what it is. This reminds me of DOS.

I've used Macs forever - but without animosity I use Windows a lot at work. I needed to paste some raw text from my program into a text file. Um. How? I don't remember the name of that windows app thing that can do that. I do remember it was a 'utility'. But where is that folder? Start menu? - nope. Metro menu? Nope. Search? What for? go through C:Program Files - nope. Crap, how do I paste this copied block of text into a new text file? Oh - I found it! Metro Apps - right click (on nothing) to bring up a menu. Click on the single item in the menu - 'Show all Applications'. And somewhere in that unordered list is that app (textpad) into which I can paste my text...

WTF!?

Is this particularly better on either a traditional start menu or OSX? Finding an application you don't know the name of will always be a difficult thing to do.

The start menu was always kind off useless

No, it was not. It was nerfed in Windows 7, presumably as a way to deprecate it before Windows 8 got rid of it entirely, but it was very useful for a great many people before that.

Installing ClassicShell to put the XP Start Menu back is the very first thing any power user should be doing on a new Windows 7/8 machine.

If I want to type the names of programs to run them, I'll launch a DOS box. I thought we had collectively agreed as an industry that this was not the best paradigm for the majority of users.

I consider myself a power user (and developer) on Windows 8 and and Windows Server 2012. I don't want (or need) the start menu back.

It became a mess very, very quickly, unless you reordered it every Saturday. Searching in that weird 'I put my application below a name that represents my company', 'I use a cute name for the folder that contains my app' and 'Ah, I just drop the shortcut right into the main start menu' mess was annoying.

Your 'DOS box' example is wrong and you know it - or should as a power user. The name is already chosen in a weird way (DOS? Really?) and you should know that the thing you're talking about doesn't

- search for partial matches in the name

- searches only the %PATH% and current directory

- isn't usable to search for documents, really

- quick: Tell me what you'd type to open the network & sharing window? The printer device list?

No idea what industry you're talking about, but your sample ruined most of your case for me. And as stated before I couldn't even understand the issue before that, since I'm quite happy with my shortcuts here. Win+x, Win+i, Win+., Win+cursorKey, Win+Pause is really all I need or care for.

Come now, the start menu is a joke and always has been. Navigating multi-layered menus, where a slight misalignment makes you lose your place? Or an unsorted jumble of applications links from years of installing? You call that usable? Any power user worth his salt ditched the start menu eons ago with launchy or something similar. Even windows 7 came with a meaningful app search.

Anyone clinging to the start menu as some sort of epitome of usability is having a "get off my lawn" moment.

It's quite usable for casual users who don't know the names of the applications and want to explore what's in the computer. KDE offers a gret solution for this; in the start menu applications are organized by category and there's a short description next to the icon explaining what it does.

If you enter a category it doesn't add a layer, it shows the applications in the same view as if you were opening a folder; and at the bottom you always have a Search bar which works great and power users can comfortably use.

So, say, you want an application to play video. You go to Applications, select the Multimedia category, and click on the icon that says "Video player".

Both Unity and Gnome3 also have solutions in which you don't have to compromise or use quirky macros to get the behaviour you want. You can have the best of both worlds. But then, as usual, many will continue bashing Linux GUIs as if they were a usability nightmare and totally inferior. C'est la vie.

There is a lot of truth to that. But I would wager that 99% of the time you know what app you want to open and its just a matter of finding it. Typing a few letters of some part of its name is definitely a win here. Another nice solution would be for apps to have categories that they can install themselves into, and the user could filter by typing generic categories like "internet", "play video", etc.

The Start Menu wasn't good because it was never utilized right. Many years before I ever saw KDE, I started organizing my apps in categories (Viewers, Networking, Storage, System, etc., I've refined the list over the years) and found that most apps can be reduced to a single icon, rather than a whole folder with a bunch of icons you'll never use, or only use once (websites, demos, documentation. And the whole "put your app in a folder named after your company" was one of the most user-hostile things ever invented.

Opening the Start Menu only to type something in seems like a useless hybrid of two disparate ways of interfacing with the computer. Once I get it set up, it takes very little effort to keep it organized in a way that's useful for me, as opposed to just being advertisements for the companies who made the software I use. I can find any app I need usually in 4 clicks (Start, Programs, Category, the app I want). That's incredibly fast, at least when Explorer doesn't have to swap in 3 gigabytes or whatever it's always doing that makes it pause for ridiculous amounts of time for the most trivial of operations.

The Start Menu was only ever "useless" because it was never implemented intelligently. Just like that useless shovelware pre-installed on new computers, it was just another place where every company that got access to your computer dumped a whole bunch of crap, most of which was only useful for _them_, not you, the user. Kind of like the \Windows directory back in the bad old days.

The Start Menu wasn't good because it was never utilized right. Many years before I ever saw KDE, I started organizing my apps in categories (Viewers, Networking, Storage, System, etc., I've refined the list over the years) and found that most apps can be reduced to a single icon, rather than a whole folder with a bunch of icons you'll never use, or only use once (websites, demos, documentation. And the whole "put your app in a folder named after your company" was one of the most user-hostile things ever invented.

Opening the Start Menu only to type something in seems like a useless hybrid of two disparate ways of interfacing with the computer. Once I get it set up, it takes very little effort to keep it organized in a way that's useful for me, as opposed to just being advertisements for the companies who made the software I use. I can find any app I need usually in 4 clicks (Start, Programs, Category, the app I want). That's incredibly fast, at least when Explorer doesn't have to swap in 3 gigabytes or whatever it's always doing that makes it pause for ridiculous amounts of time for the most trivial of operations.

The Start Menu was only ever "useless" because it was never implemented intelligently. Just like that useless shovelware pre-installed on new computers, it was just another place where every company that got access to your computer dumped a whole bunch of crap, most of which was only useful for _them_, not you, the user. Kind of like the \Windows directory back in the bad old days.

And I use a graphics tablet with a handful of programmable keys as my primary input device (the keyboard spends most of its time off to the side for very occasional text input and the odd rarely-used one-handed shortcut chord) and have several sets of applications (each of which is best-of-breed for a slightly different purpose) whose names start with the same set of characters (and, in at least one set of similarly-named apps, don't diverge until the tenth character). It is far quicker for me to use the start menu, since typing (or even multitouch gestures) involve putting down the stylus. Not a common use case, perhaps, but one that ought to be accommodated easily. And maybe I can bridge the gap temporarily with a third-party solution, but will that even be possible in the future?

You can still click at the lower left corner of your screen to switch to the start page (exactly as you would open the start menu in Win7); then if you organized your favorite apps icons on the left of this page you should still be able to open the app you want with a second click.

I do this too, but often I need to use my mouse to select a control panel item or file. That's very annoying. Why would they get rid of universal search from Windows 7?

tab + down then enter also does that.

or

Windows-W opens the settings search directly Windows- F opens the file search directly

Universal, I think, also implies single unified search. OSX has this, iOS has this, Android has this, Windows 7 has this. Heck even Windows Vista has this. Windows 8? Nope. This is the most frustrating part of using Windows 8.

So what about users who discovered things with a mouse? Are they just banished to Metro, never to return? Every time I read some defence of Windows 8' it's always "Oh everything is the same, just use all these keyboard shortcuts you never knew until now, and have never once seen causal users use".

If you have to touch the keyboard and simply know a comamand and there is no easier way to invoke it, it's bad, non-discoverable UI design.

You can filter using keyboard shortcuts or the mouse, so I think that's fine, I just want an unfiltered view. There used to be universal search and now there isn't.

SO .. where can I find the windows menu? That's how I launched apps. And normally by name by typing.

win key + type or mouse to bottom left corner + type