If you do end up having to select something in the menu, you now have more space to see what's available and modifying the layout to match your usage is a lot more accessible.
A full-screen menu appearing on top of whatever I am working on completely breaks my flow. It's immensely distracting to me. As a result, I literally never use it. Instead I use Launchy [1] which is well behaved and keeps within the confines of a very small dialogue box.
That doesn't completely fix Windows 8, though - there's still a bunch of touch-orientated stuff that there's no native way to deactivate.
I do think Microsoft should have made it optional - it's obvious this is what people wanted, and it's not like it would have cost them much in development/support. Still, at least there's now a huge bunch of third party software to replace/augment it, most with far greater configurability than the original Start menu.
- Install
- Type in visualstud... I get CALCULATOR...
- Uninstall...
Launchy has absolutely NOTHING on Windows 8 Key + typing.
I have seen some people put the windows 7 style start menu on win 8 - it just doesn't make sense to me, the world moves on, things change, learn to adapt and life is so much sweeter!
Actually, you don't - on the server I am using there is an (otherwise excellent) Microsoft product installed that prefixes all of it's menu items with the same name so all you see is a number of items with the same logo and "Really long product name...." and to find out which one is which you have to hover the mouse over them, which rather defeats the purpose of the whole exercise.
I wonder how many options will go the way of the shutdown button in Windows 9 - that is, moved entirely.
And the first ten do have keyboard shortcuts - Win-0 to Win-9.