I think one of the more controversial parts of Windows 11 – aside from its system requirements, privacy issues, crapware, and “AI” nonsense – is its Start menu. I’ve heard so many complaints about how it’s organised, its performance, the lack of customisation, and so on. Microsoft heard those complaints, and has unveiled the new Start menu that’ll be shipping to Windows 11 soon – and I have to say, there’s a ton of genuine improvements here that I think many of you will be happy with.
First and foremost, the “all applications” view, that until now has been hidden behind a button, will be at the top level, and you can choose between a category view, a grid view, and a list view. This alone makes the Windows 11 Start menu so much more usable, and will be more than enough to make a lot of users want to upgrade, I’m sure.
Second, customisation is taken a lot more seriously in this new incarnation of the Start menu. You can actually shrink or remove completely sections you’re not using. If you’re not interested in those recommendations, you can just remove that section. Don’t want to use the feature where you pin applications to the Start menu? Remove that section. This, too, seems to address common complaints, and I’m glad Microsoft is fixing this.
Then there’s the rest. Microsoft is promising this new Start menu will perform better, which better be true because I’ve seen some serious lag and delays on incredibly powerful hardware. The recommendations have been improved as well, in case you care about those, and there’s a new optional mobile panel that you can slide out, which contains everything related to your phone.
Personally, I’m a classic Start menu kind of person – on all my machines (which all run Fedora KDE), I use a classic, very traditional cascading menu that contains nothing but application categories and their respective applications, and nothing more. Still, were I forced to use Windows, these improvements are welcome, and they seem genuine.
Just let me move my taskbar to the left .
Windows 7 let me do this.
Windows 10 lets me do this.
Win 11 always supported that.
No it doesn’t.
It lets you move the start button to the left side of the taskbar, but the taskbar remains on the bottom.
They are talking about a vertical taskbar along the left side of the screen.
Microsoft is too busy adding garbage features and candy crush to windows, how can people expect them to support something so complex as this.
Ah, you’re right. It didn’t occur to me that’s what the question was. The last time I tried (for a few minutes) moving the taskbar to the side was probably during the XP days, maybe even 98.
Recently tried to customize the Win11 menu with a script that I need to push out to a fleet of systems.
What a hot garbage experience.
It’s an utter embarrassment to MS that it has taken this long to get it even remotely manageable to where it was.
Instead, I deployed Open-Shell and was able to customize perfectly.
After having recently used windows 11 for the first time, I discovered that it could no longer be customized to remove the “recommended” section. I thought this was a bug, or that there would be a secret switch, but it turned out this was the intended behavior.
https://superuser.com/questions/1818978/cannot-turn-off-recommendations-for-start-menu-in-windows-11
Yea I know there are comments about delete recommendations individually or using a 3rd party start menu altogether, but microsoft seemingly went out of their way to make sure users could not simply disable all recommendations.
Does this new start menu respect the user’s desire to permanently disable recommendations?
You can block the akamai servers responisble for the recommendations in the /windows/system32/drivers/etc/hosts file.
NaGERST,
Thank you, I’ll investigate this further the next time I have a project on windows. I don’t typically use it as a daily driver.
I’m glad it’s finally coming. The start menu was the most annoying thing in Windows 11, for me. The second one being them constantly trying to sell you an Office 365 subscription. I guess that won’t ever disappear.
Once you get rid of the crapware, Win11 is a rather good OS in my opinion.
After modifying an ISO with Rufus and then running Win11Debloat script, kinda.
Ultimately, it’s Windows 10 with more intrusive crapware.
Remember how much we hated Win10? It’s like MS pulled a “oh they hate it? hold my beer” on us.
And then setting the connection to metered, so that further updates won’t bring crap back.
I certainly didn’t hate Win10, Its arrival was quite a relief after Win8 🙂
Overall, Win11 is a pretty good UI redesign. For instance, the menu you get when so do a right click is way less messy than it traditionally was. There are also several improvements there and there that I really enjoy.
So they finally decided to do something about the appalling adoption rates of win11.
How about re-releasing a win7 with a dark theme, updated behind the scenes only as win12 and forgetting about win11 just like we all forgot about winme?
Wondering if/when they’ll get this on IoT LTSC.
This strikes me as quite funny-
“First and foremost, the “all applications” view, that until now has been hidden behind a button, will be at the top level, and you can choose between a category view, a grid view, and a list view.”
The default action to select an application that is not pinned requires 4 clicks. Firing up an app using Linux Mint from the Cinnamon menu takes 2 clicks along with possibly a bit of scroll wheel action.
I don’t think Microsoft is capable of making a clean, usable UI today.
The worse part of the WIndows menu for me, as a Linux and KDE user myself, is that the menu executes an async call to the app, and WAITS until the process actually starts and responds, to vanish, with no user feedback that you actually did anything. When you forget abut it, you will open the same app 4 or more times, because you think you did not yet click or pressed enter correctly.
Windows usability is VERY BAD.
I never thought about it and the last version of KDE I used was 1.x so I don’t know which way they managed to prevent this 🙂
But since Win7, I think most Windows user rely on the taskbar (that has some improvements in Win11) and only use the start menu for less commonly used application. The actual issue was this useless screen appearing before being able to get to the app list.
> Personally, I’m a classic Start menu kind of person – on all my machines (which all run Fedora KDE), I use a classic, very traditional cascading menu that contains nothing but application categories and their respective applications, and nothing more.
Also a start-menu-traditionalist here. To be honest, though, I barely use start menus any more. Even on os’s where they aren’t a big pile of canine manure.
Whenever I read “Microsoft unveils its new…” I know beforehand that we are talking about an useless and irrelevant piece of crap.
I hope you’re a Mac user…
Why are you, as in all those in here who have strong feelings about the start menu, launching applications by clicking? The stuff i use all the time is pinned to the task bar, everything else i start by hitting the windows key and typing the first few letters of the name and hitting enter. Last time i could tell you what was on my start menu was Windows Vista, or maybe XP, can’t remember if the Vista search was good enough. I can understand normal users, but here on OSnews? Even when i used Linux for desktop i didn’t need to navigate a menu to launch applications.
You are of course complete free to launch stuff any way you like, i am just a bit surprised that in a place filled with what i imagine is power users, that this is the part of Windows that is complained about. But okay, i also keep hearing software developers ranting about code styling instead of things that matter.
I’ll still be installing a replacement once I’m forced onto 11 as the Start Menu hasn’t been the same since Windows 7.