Let me start by saying: I loved Windows 8 from the very beginning. I loved Windows 8 when it was Windows Phone 7. I think Metro was a great style, huge gorgeous tiles were wonderful. I should also mention that I haven't used the Start Menu since 2006 or so. I just don't think it's a good way to organize... Anything, really. Scratch that, I
did start using the Start Menu again when I got Windows 7, but only for search. Press the Windows key and type what I want to launch. It was very similar to dmenu I thought, and I loved it. But that's besdie the point.
Start menu, yeah? Awful. It occured to me one day when I looking for some DLL I was sure I had, and saw that Windows XP still had progman.exe. That's strange, sounds like Program Manager, and sure enough, it was a compatibility layer for it. I did some investigative jiggery-pokery and found that all this did was convert Program Manger groups to Start Menu folders. Does anyone remember that? Installing a game, and instead of going in the Games group (Or folder), it went in it's own group, or later, it went in a folder named for the publisher, then in a sub-folder about the game. And the thing I hated most was that the publishers weren't even self-consistent. And this isn't just games, this is just about everything. Who had folders for Microsoft, Microsoft Office (Containing folders for each office app!) and Microsoft Essentials, and a host of others. Just from Microsoft!
As time went on, some programs got nice, and the installers would ask you where you wanted start menu links to be installed, or even better yet, allowed you to opt out completely, but still, Start Menus were a mess. Why do you need a folder that has a single folder in it containing a single shortcut to a program you use every day? Or even worse, when you use it frequently, but not frequently enough to pin to the top level? Or to put on the desktop? (Or you don't like tonnes of icons littering your desktop?)
So yeah, I've hated the Start Menu for years. I've tried a bunch of different launchers, from docks to hotkeys to
this monstrosity I eventually settled on using the quicklaunch bar, and later in Windows 7 the super bar, which was great, and still my primary launcher on Windows. But when Microsoft announced that they were exploring a replacement for the Start Menu, I though, "Damn it's about time." The Start Menu is just an awful design. There aren't two ways about it. It's terrible, and it's even worse from Vista onward where instead of having these nice, readable flyout menus, everything is constrained to a small box that only displays 15 or so items. It makes navigation a nightmare, and an already poor design downright unusable.
The first time I used Windows 8 was during the developer preview. I wasn't as impressed as I wanted to be. There were no apps, so everything launched to the desktop, so why not just keep using the Superbar that's done so well for me for so many years? It was years later that I actually began using the Start screen. Last year, in fact, when I got a Surface, and realized that the superbar just wouldn't work with my fat sausages. So I started using the Start Screen and thought it was fine. Not great, not terrible, but it worked and it worked well. I could easily get to my most used apps, and if those weren't there, I could just start typing (on my PC) or swipe up to find a beautiful full screen list of all installed applications, arranged alphabetically and all on the top level, but still separated to keep all the installers with their programs and suites like Office and Adobe together. It was great, if a little clumsy. And once I stared using the Start Screen as secondary storage for programs I don't use enough to warrant being on the Superbar, I thought it was great. A dashboard of my second most used apps. Wonderful!
So that was a lot of how to do to get to the point: I liked Windows 8's UI. There were some silly things, espeically when you first start using it and it plops a huge arrow on the side of the screen, asking you to swipe even though you don't have a touch screen. But in general, it was great. Windows 8 was a huge speed increase over Windows 7 on the same (already three or four year old) hardware, and things were generally good. It took a minute to find where some things had moved to, but once I was used to it, I found it just as usable as Windows 7, plus the window decorations were prettier, the search was improved, and in general, things were just better. I'm still of the opinion that anyone who feels negatively about Windows 8 also thinks that Macs are just for designers, or that the Internet and the Web are the same thing. They will probably have trouble through their lives since they have difficulty trying new things.
So now on to the topic. Windows 10, yeah? So let's look at the Start Menu. To be honest, I haven't used it that much. Like, at all. I'm just not that kind of person. I'm glad the right-click menu is the same, because that's how I shut down my computer. I turned off pretty much everything in the start menu, actually. I don't even remember what used to be there above Documents. But I'll tell you this, clicking All Programs and having it open in this dinky-ass sub-pane was unacceptable. I switched to full screen mode immediately, and was very surprised to find that even in this mode, the apps are still restricted to a single extremely narrow pane on the left side of the screen.
Regardless of how you feel about the Start Menu you must admit this is not an optimal solution. 75% of the screen is wasted when what I want is quick access to a program that I want to run. I want to be able to
see what is available, not to scroll. This is my main gripe with Windows 10. If there is a fix for this, please, please let me know. Hopefully Microsoft sees the error of their ways and fixes this, because it's just not okay.
But otherwise, do I like Windows 10? Yes. Yes very much. The animations for the Start Menu and jumplists are a nice touch, but not distracting. The window decorations are pretty nice, though I think I preferred the Windows 8 versions, and I definitely miss being able to set the color of title bars. I like that they got rid of the 10 pixel window borders though. That was extremely unnecessary. I haven't used Cortana yet, because I don't want to tie my microsoft account into Windows--mostly because I don't want to choose a weaker password for that account, and don't want to have a long password to unlock my computer.
I like the notifications area--sort of. I need some more programs to start making use of it, but right now I have the Windows Mail app set up to check my email, even though I still use webmail, it's nice to get a toaster when I get new email. My only problem is that deleting email doesn't remove the notification like it does in Android, but that might be preferable, I sometimes loose Android notifactions I wanted to see because I looked at something and it thought I was acknowledging the notification. I like how the new Superbar handles running apps, even though it reminds me a lot of how OS X does things, it's looks very pretty, for lack of a better word.
I like being able to tap the Windows key and check the weather, though. That's cute and I'll probably keep that there, but most of the live tiles are worthless to me and I'll probably clean almost all of them out soon. Actually, damn I knew Windows 10 reinstalled a bunch of the Windows 8 apps I never used, which was mildly annoying, but I just noticed that it installed Candy Crush Saga without my consent!
While I'm on the topic,
Combine this with the fact that you can't remove shortcuts to modern UI programs that you will never use,
What do you mean? I got rid of everything on the Start menu.
As for the apps... Well, I tried the photos app first, because I'm kind of annoyed with some things Picasa has been doing lately, and found it terrible. It's just weird. Arrow keys sometimes don't cycle through images, there's no "Actual Size" button, pressing left or right on my scroll wheel goes the opposite direction (I think this is trying to mimic swipe for some reason?) and the UI is kind of ugly. Same with the Videos app. I thought it would be nice if I could replace VLC with a native app, but it was just no good. I only used it once, though, so your mileage may vary.
Windows Explorer is really good. 8's was already a huge improvement over 7, and 10 fine tunes it even more, including recently accessed folders under your pinned folders.
The game recording feature seems cool, but my video card is unsupported. Blah.
So that's my thoughts. And, as a final aside to match Tony's, if you don't like the start menu:
