This is one of the reasons I stayed. It was still small enough back then that you actually started to recognize people you had conversations with, and not just the troll farms.

Who’s chopper is this?

Fucking Phil.

Maybe I’m misunderstanding the issue, but I’m reading it as a dislike for the new “modern” start menu in win11 that’s center screen and feels designed for touch interfaces?

You can disable that and turn it more like a win 7 style start menu.

but I still can’t get over the crippled start menu

You know you can set it back to “legacy”, right? I’ve been using Win11 since it was beta and when you swap the new default gui elements back to “legacy”, it’s much better than even win 10.