Windows 12 could see a substantial system redesign in order to include a more AI-centric user experience. The start button could thus be replaced with Copilot AI, which is already available as a preview version in the latest Windows 11 update.
I'm not a Microsoft fan by any means but I've not had any real issues with Start menu searching for well over five years.
I just use it to search for the program I want to launch and it's done that pretty fluidly. To the point where that's basically all the start menu is for me. If they switch it to copilot without a way to disable it then I'll probably permanently switch over to Linux when it's time for an OS rebuild.
It works inconsistently for me to the point that I just can't rely on it.
I can give a very recent example, my W11 has also be freshly installed and there's not much stuff installed yet.
I have portable version of HWinfo located in My Documents folder.
If I start typing "hwi" into search it will sometimes find it, sometimes it will find it only if I type "hw" but not find it if I type "hwi" so if I type fast I must then delete character... And sometimes it needs me to type whole name of the application and sometimes it won't find anything no matter what I type.
Then there is Riva Tuner Statistics Server which is an installed application located on C: in Program Files folder. It launches with RTSS.exe... It may as well not exist for Windows search because no matter what I type it can't ever find it.
For me the trick was to disable web search. I don't remember how I did it but you can Google it. Then it was really nice and fast, as it should've always been
Unfortunately it has a habit of jumping around due to its asynchronous weird fuzzy search. So when typing fast you sometimes randomly launch the wrong action. It is especially inconsistent, because files are also indexed and by default it also includes web searches so the behavior is always changing.
I believe this got introduced with Windows 10 and feels just bad. Unless you are typing slowly and actually scan the results the search is doing a bad job as an application launcher like it was with Windows 7 for example.
Gotta just make an icon on the desktop that dies a full shutdown, full especially because Microsoft basically made that harder to do. Now I just double click an icon and call it a day.
I wish I could upvote many times - does anyone do this differently? Does Microsoft think “maybe if we make a useless search with ai instead of bing, people will use it?”
Did you put the application in the start menu during install?
Linux-onlyists have a tendency to not learn how anything works and then blame the "bad workflow" of the OS, so it's kind of difficult to just assume you didn't make a mistake.
yeah, I use my start button all the time to quickly open stuff. Hit start, start typing the program name, hit enter because it shows up immediately as a suggestion. super quick with no need to touch the mouse