Blue95: a desktop for your childhood home's computer room

Three modern desktop environments that I use:

- Windows 10/11. Especially in 11, it's easiest just to type the start of an app's name into the search box. As opposed to the two clicks it takes to get to the "traditional" menu where you still have to scroll to find it.

- Gnome (only on fresh Linux installs, usually replaced with Mate pretty soon). Has a smartphone-style app grid, but here, too, its quickest just to type the start of the app's name.

- Mate: Modern, but still has the Windows 95 paradigm (easy enough to collapse the two toolbars into just one bottom one). Still my favourite desktop environment.

Not all fancy graphic stuff is good. And don't even get me started on how hard it is to drag an app window to another screen these days - on Windows. You really have to find the 2% or so of the top bar that's still draggable and not cluttered up by other stuff.

How do you get Windows to launch an installed app after you type the first few letters, instead of searching the web with Edge and Bing?

You can download openshell and it will replace the start menu from the start menu from whatever era you want (XP, 7, 8, I think 10 too). It's open source as well

The decline in usability and organization of the Windows start menu over the years has been frankly staggering.

Whenever I see screenshots of the old menu I get pangs of nostalgia.

Type into the search box and when the app icon comes up, click on it.

At least you get the right-click menu that has a lot of handy stuff in the old format.

I think they drank the Macintosh kool-aid and expect you to have all your commonly used apps pinned. In Win11 this even looks sort of like a Mac dock. Still made no sense to ruin the usability of the start menu which they invented.

I use two free programs to return my computer usability to Windows 10 days.

https://open-shell.github.io/Open-Shell-Menu/

https://github.com/valinet/ExplorerPatcher

Without these I would probably give up on computers and go live under a bridge.

"I searched bing for you and here's the link to Word on the web"

What happens when you are no longer the darling. And PMs need to ship something new to get noticed, so they screw it all up

I am 99% sure that this is the result of academic GUI design and focus testing.

I read all the Windows 8 development blogs, and everything they wrote about seemed absolutely justified. Then you actually use the thing and it was a nightmare.

Same with their approach to hardware, the Duke Xbox controller tested really well, but then someone with daintier hands went to use it and uh actually its great for like 15% of the user base.

Dunno. On the relatively clean Windows 11 on my laptop, on which I'd never run Teams before, I typed "tea" into the search box (no ENTER) and while it also offered to look up on the web about "Tea" it did show "Microsoft Teams (personal) (app) at the top right with a large, clickable icon.

I used winaero tweaker [1] to disable web search, the search is infinitely better now.

You can do the same tweak by editing the registry [2] if you don't want to download an app for it (though the app includes a lot of additional useful tweaks).

[1] https://winaerotweaker.com/

[2] https://www.tomshardware.com/how-to/disable-windows-web-sear...

Sometimes I wonder if the people designing this stuff ever actually use dual displays day to day