I love Windows 7, but do you honestly think the Windows 7 start menu is not broken? I believe we just got used to it over time.
In Windows 7, I can either have an unstructured list of "pinned" programs, or I can manually categorize the real ("All programs") start menu.
Option 1 doesn't scale beyond ~15 items (I have 22 pinned programs and it's a mess), and option 2 breaks whenever a program updates itself and puts new links into the top level. Also, option 2 is not an option at all for 99,9% of users, so it's quite obvious why MS wouldn't optimize for that use case.
The single thing that I like the most about Windows 8.1 machines is how I can group programs on the start page. Now that it isn't fullscreen any more with Windows 10, I am pretty much looking forward to it.
My biggest problem with Windows 7 and especially the start menu was that certain folders were first class citizens and other were not. I could never quite figure out how to instruct someone to get to their user folder or understand why downloads were not a library.
Oh yeah, those libraries are a PITA. I disabled them entirely (using some registry hack I guess). It's easy to forget about those little pain points once you have worked around them.
In my experience muscle memory is just as easy to pick up with typing the name of an app than clicking - apps I use all the time I can open by typing their name without thinking about what the name is, apps I don't use all the time I find myself opening the metro start screen and wondering which will happen first, remembering the name to type or spotting it in my tiles.
You're right. Though at least on Windows 7, typing to search apps in the start menu was a miserable experience that takes dozens of seconds to find the application you're looking for. I hope they have improved it in 10.
I had this discussion several times when Windows 8 first came out. As much as I didn't really like the Start Page, it didn't affect me that much as I search for everything. I've been doing that so long that actually using the mouse to find an application (not on the desktop or taskbar) feels awkward.
I love Windows 7, but do you honestly think the Windows 7 start menu is not broken? I believe we just got used to it over time.
In Windows 7, I can either have an unstructured list of "pinned" programs, or I can manually categorize the real ("All programs") start menu.
Option 1 doesn't scale beyond ~15 items (I have 22 pinned programs and it's a mess), and option 2 breaks whenever a program updates itself and puts new links into the top level. Also, option 2 is not an option at all for 99,9% of users, so it's quite obvious why MS wouldn't optimize for that use case.
The single thing that I like the most about Windows 8.1 machines is how I can group programs on the start page. Now that it isn't fullscreen any more with Windows 10, I am pretty much looking forward to it.