Thanks, I hate it

Had to spin up a virtual windows machine the other day and was just honestly appalled at how bad the desktop experience is these days

That looks pretty ugly. I'm not really a fan of trying to make computers look more like phones but I think I'm in the minority there. Oh well, I never use the start menu anyways, I only have a few programs and they're all pinned to my taskbar.

Looks like MacOS and various Linux distros had a deformed, illegitimate child.

Not sure when it started, but I've already noticed some Start Menu fuckery with just the 'Sign Out' portion. I believe you previously just clicked on your profile picture/name and the options for signing out were right there. They've "helpfully" hidden those options now beneath a ••• menu for no apparent reason. I was a little aggravated when I first noticed it because it seemingly changed out of nowhere. Not a huge change, but it requires one more click to do now.

IF the categorization works well, and that's a big if, I like it.

And if the categorization isn't absolutely perfect, you can bet everyone will be clamoring to be allowed to customize it or disable it.

I like the phone link integration. I've never been a fan out auto-populating app folders though.

Where's all the ads though? They've gotta be thinking about turning one of the folders into a recommended apps folder or something dumb. They'll sneak something in somewhere.

It's not as bad as people here are making it out to be. It actually might even be an improvement. It's only for the all apps tab, and it organizes apps by their purpose, and you don't have to click the folder to expand it and then click the icon, as you can just click the icon and it will launch it. I've been using Windows 11 since it came out, and the all apps tab is something I have barely ever used. All my important stuff is neatly organized in one single tab of my home star menu screen, and anything that is not there I'll just look it up with search.

This is a new layout for the "all apps" section. It is toggle able, so if you don't like it you don't need to use it. I will give it a try but I don't often go into all apps anyway.

So much negativity here.