Just throwing icons on the desktop is not really my thing, because then I have to deal with minimizing all open windows to access it. They can't be freely placed, either, they are arranged in rows sort of like iOS.

On Windows 11, I think you can only pin 18 items before having to scroll through them. The most common stuff I have pinned to the taskbar, but the Start menu has easily 80+ apps available at a glance. So, opening an app is just Windows key + click, even faster than typing in the search bar. It's laid out in a way that makes sense to me and I know where everything is.

Since Windows 8, I've adopted an approach of pinning basically everything that I could need to the start menu. Not because of Live Tiles, that was a nifty feature but I never saw it used in a way that was 'useful' other than maybe the weather app tile. I for one will miss the Windows 10 Start menu. You can launch it by hitting Windows + R and typing 'regedit.' Click Yes if prompted. The Search box does absolutely nothing when you click on it and the Taskview, in my experience, almost always crashes, causing icons even of open apps to disappear temporarily, so in other words, don't click it, or better yet, hide it, which we'll show you how to do.ġ. This taskbar looks and feels a little bit more like the Windows 10 taskbar and has a Search box and a Task View button. However, in order to get Open-Shell to use a Windows 10 Start button icon, you need to enable the classic taskbar in the Registry. If you've installed Start11 or StartAllBack, the programs will automatically enhance your taskbar with some options so we recommend that you skip this section. Another possibility is to uncheck Replace Start Button in Open-Shell's options menu and use the classic taskbar hack (see below) and then you'll get a clickable, Windows 10-style Start button.

Github taskbar x