[stinos]

Have you considered not bothering with manually going through the start menu but just typing what you want, or otherwise pinning mostly used apps to the taskbar? Both are faster and more convenient than point-search-click and taskbar allows grouping. Only downside: typing in the start menu does not always work flawlessly; can't pinpoint the exact problem but seems like there's some algorithm behind it which takes some time to get the most used things to the top. Also it's not truly fuzzy matching, which is imo by far the best and fastest way for launching/searching anything (think Ctrl-P in text editors like SublimeText/VSCode or using fzf on the command line)

[aksss]

Yep, search is a thing, but far from preferable to menu customization for me - not as hs/ld, in my opinion. Requires more input and more brain cycles to start typing a name with (potentially) both hands than to hit the win key and select the pictograph that’s immediately there in the same spot every time. It’s hardly a process of manually going through the start menu unless you need something unpinned. Having both options is great, but I like my regular ‘work tools’ laid out before me, arranged by activity - a pod of icons for my video/audio editing, a pod for dev work tools, a pod of icons for office apps, etc.

But yeah, in win11 search is more of a focus not because it’s a new feature compared to win10, but because they hobbled the other features, and that seems like an enormous step backwards to me (the loss of customization/options).

Win 11 lets you pin apps to the menu still, but there’s no grouping, half the menu is taken up by a “recommended” section, and there’s no resizing of it. For the unchangeable half of the menu, which so far as I can tell is not an MRU list, it does hold recently installed apps from the store (and nowhere else) and likely will be used to stub in advertised apps (call me cynical). It’s a crippling change, and I suspect we’ll see those features added back in sooner or later. Much like win8.1. That’s about the best I can hope for anyway. MS is intent to release as-is.