Looks great, but not very realistic. The real Win11 start menu doesn't open immediately, it glitches in various ways for 3-4 times before actually working. Realism 7/10

I use https://github.com/valinet/ExplorerPatcher to fix start menu and taskbar.

Can't imagine using Windows without it.

Since I installed PowerToys[0] and activated Run, I barely use the taskbar to start any program. It works like alt+f2 on Ubuntu, which is the experience I find most useful.

[0] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/powertoys/

Powertoys feels like one arm of Microsoft to fix windows’ shortcomings due to the other arm via an independent app rather than fixing the actual component because doing so is too fraught with politics and incentives.

So Microsoft does know how to fix the problems with Windows, but simply chooses not to because of internal politics? Because I keep wondering how such a big, well-established company full of smart people can create such a piece of crap as their flagship product.

The impression I got from reading through some of the Windows Terminal[0] issues/release notes, is that

It's understandable that it's much slower and more challenging to make changes to functionality that's become part of Windows core.

If something in PowerToys turns out to be a bad idea, it can be removed. It's much harder to justify that when it's been baked into the OS.

[0] https://github.com/microsoft/terminal