[lproven]

I'm both. (Mac and Windows since 1988, before Linux existed.) The point of the start menu is that you can search; the point of Spotlight is that the computer searches.

With Spotlight, you're telling the computer to run something you know is there, without bothering looking for it. You need to know it's there.

With a dedicated app launcher, such as say the macOS Launchpad, you can explore what apps are available to you. Once you know, you can quickly open it with cmd+space and 2-3 letters.

You can't open things that aren't there. You need to find what's available.

They are different tools for different purposes, which is why Launchpad is also there.

[frollogaston]

Exactly, except the problem with Launchpad is it's cumbersome and takes up the entire screen. I never use it, just have to know exactly what I'm looking for and use cmd-space.

[lproven]

> just have to know exactly what I'm looking for

And how do you acquire that knowledge? Browsing. Looking and reading, and remembering.

Mac OS X had no mechanism for this, but iOS does. iOS's Springboard launcher is lifted directly from the Dashboard in OS X "Tiger". Apple simplified it for the phone to only show apps. Then later they grafted it back in its simplified phone form -- Dashboard having been removed in the meantime.

Before that you had to browse the filesystem. To do that you need to know where to look.

That's how it worked on classic MacOS, and Windows 1 and 2, and DR-GEM, and AmigaOS, and RISC OS, and basically all other 1980s GUIs.

(Proprietary Unix left you with a terminal. Job done.)

The innovation in Windows 3 was having an app launcher program with groups. It was called Program Manager. It had groups, because it's quicker to look in the group related to what you want than in all apps. ProgMan was stolen from OS/2 1.1 by the way.

Win 95 had a further innovation that built on that. It shrank Program Manager down from a full-screen app to a single button, that opened up on a hierarchical list, and that list had icons in it because some people are more visual and recognise icons better than names.

Me, I'm a reader, I want words not pictures. Pictures waste my time and my screen space. That's why it's important to offer a choice. GNOME takes away choice. The GNOME devs have a Vision and you must use it. The KDE devs don't have a vision. They have nearly as many visions as developers, and they try to accommodate all of them.

Not everyone: just the devs. Examples:

* I use widescreens. We all use widescreens now. I want the title bars on the side, like in wm2, not on top. That's not an option.

* I liked BeOS. I think title bars should be tabbed, like in web browsers. That's not an option.

* I hate hamburger menus. I want menu bars. There is no global option for that. You can't have it.

* I hate CSD. I want a title bar I can middle-click to send behind all other windows, like KDE 1, 2, 3 and 4 did, as well as every other non-GNOME desktop. I also liked Windowblinds on classic MacOS: the ability to roll up windows into the title bar. Again, like in some older KDE versions. There's no option for that any more.

There is important choice, accommodating different needs and usage patterns, and there is cosmetic choice, merely affecting how things look but not the underlying mechanisms of how they work.

Supporting diversity of usage is more important than diversity of appearance.

Both the full desktops that natively support Wayland fail to do this.

[qn9n]

Realistically you shouldn't need thousands of applications so remembering the names of the 20 or so apps I use isn't a big deal.

[lproven]

Good for you.

I've been doing tech support since 1988. I've seen many many PCs with hundreds of apps, some maybe heading into thousands, sometimes with custom hackery to get different versions running in parallel and stuff.

Yes this is a thing. It is common.

And the typical user does not know what an "app" is, or what OS they are using. I've lost count of the number of people that told me their computer was running Word or Office (not Windows), or who think they access the Web via Google because they don't know what a web browser is.

Here is some proof, in case you don't believe me.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4MwTvtyrUQ

If you can name the 20 apps you use the most often, you are the elite of the elite, the top 1% of 1% of computer users.

Normal people are not like that. They don't know what they use or what it's called or what OS they run or what an "OS" is, and they outnumber us by approximately a million to one.

[qn9n]

I used to work tech support as well... For this case if I was on a user machine and needed to browse for apps I would open Finder.app and navigate to /Applications, this is what I did even with Launchpad existing because it's more convenient to navigate and search as it's just a standard window instead of some full screen thing. This would mean I could continue reading documentation alongside the finder window.

> sometimes with custom hackery to get different versions running in parallel and stuff.

Most users just aren't doing this, they open up their Mac, install a few applications and then just use it as intended; they don't need to customise things and wouldn't care to spend the time even if it benefited them. If they are capable of implementing these custom hacks and things they are likely intelligent enough to navigate via Finder and Spotlight for almost all use cases.

> If you can name the 20 apps you use the most often, you are the elite of the elite, the top 1% of 1% of computer users.

I don't think so, most people I know whether that's friends or colleagues (some technical, some not) use maybe 3–5 apps:

Browser Word Processer Spreadsheets Notes Task Management (reminders, asana, jira or something) Music Player (some just use the browser)

people don't have 20+ applications to remember day in day out.

Hell even as a power user I only really use:

Terminal Browser IDE Creative Tools (Logic, Final Cut, Compressor, etc.) Notes Reminders Music Player

[lproven]

It seems to me that your answer is really spelling out my point, illustrated with examples.

It says:

* "I'm a terminal user"

* "I am a programmer"

(Which means, "I am therefore more technical than 99.9% of people"

* "I use an OS carefully handcrafted to make the file manager an acceptable app browser"

(Because what you describe is impossible on any form of Windows or non-Apple Unix)

* "I use a sophisticated tool which can find things both by name and by description"

You are not arguing my point; you are in fact reinforcing it.