The Latest Windows 11 Update Gets Rid of the Start Menu and Explorer

I hate Windows as much as the next person, but the title is clickbait. It’s an update bug that affects a small number of users, but the title misleadingly suggests Microsoft deliberately removed this functionality.

oh it was a bug, i thought they did it on purpose to force people to use their stupid ai crap.

We're running the oldest supported Windows version in our enterprise just to make sure these non-stop stream of Microsoft fuck-ups doesn't affect us too much.

oldest supported
So, Windows 11 then, right?
- Enterprises outside of Europe can get another year of Windows 10 if they pay for it.
- Yes, 23H2 at the moment.
  Edit: Enterprise edition, to be clear. Home and Pro 23H2 were eol a couple of weeks ago.

This isn't satirical?

Reads like a onion article

I have Linux everywhere except one computer that needs to run Windows. Can I configure it to delay updates by, say, two weeks?

They're still allowing you to hold back updates? So nice of them.
- Well, you can configure only manual updates with notifications but I'd prefer automatic updates except not on day zero. At least on Win 1X Pro, on Home I think not.

checks that it's not an onion article Oh..
I think it is time to revive: "It's not a bug, it's a feature!"
Glad I decided to never touch 11. Seems almost customary to skip every second Windows version by now. I'm curious to see if it will be just a skip and they get their shit back together by 12. For now, surprisingly, I do not miss Windows one bit.
I still keep 10 around as dual boot for PCVR. Sure, I got it working (mostly) on Bazzite but its by no means trivial and hassle free. Everything else was smooth sailing most of the time. Just the few times I crashed head first into the immutable nature, caused me a bit of a headache.

At this point Win 11 has waaaaay surpassed Vista as the worst windows ever.

Surely ME was worse than Vista?
- I had WINME as my first hand me down. It wasn't that bad. Vista straight up constantly crashes, BT did not work, audio issues. It was a mess
- WinME was just Win98 with a paint job. And as Win98 was, it was pretty decent.
  (WinXP was my personal favourite)
Were you not around for Windows ME? I'd take Vista any day over that hot streaming pile of regret.

Okay, wow. I've garnered plenty of downvotes on the Fediverse by not auto-hating many of Microsoft's new features and updates, I'm sure I've been labelled a "Microsoft shill" or somesuch in some folks' user notes. But this is just ridiculous.

The single most important rule Microsoft should have is "thou shalt not brick thy customers' computers with a routine update." Sure, it's not the most common set of triggering conditions in the world, but the problem is immediate and obvious upon booting up. How do they not have a test plan that would catch this?

Looking at all the new features and how none of them have appealed to me with it being different attempts at forcing copilot I think the only happy Windows users are ltsc ones. Closest experience to a dumb OS that doesn't change and just installs and runs the programs you install and came with minimal bloatware compared to new regular Windows.
Because they fired the QA department years ago, in favour of non-rigorous testing by users crazy enough to run whatever Microsoft's version of a nightly build is. Because there's no testing plan, some sets of conditions never do get tested.
Because the rigour and quality of work that is needed to do good software to get to market is insanely higher than the one required for keeping the money machine alive once you are a monopoly. So as you hire more and more to get your hands in as many pies as possible, have fewer and fewer experienced staff to train the new hires, and do questionable hires in leadership positions, the culture invariably shifts to doing less and less effort, or putting effort in the wrong place, and there you have it.
Now in Microsoft's case, the quality was never that high to begin with (but the scummy practices made up for that), and the pockets are deep aplenty, so I think we are in for quite the shitshow (it can, and it will, get even worse).
- I'm convinced at this point they're letting the vibe coders write the OS updates. It's the only reasonable explanation for how they keep breaking core OS functionality that shouldn't even be getting updates.

At the moment the only fix is likely a reimage, unless you can get to the registry to make some edits or deploy a Powershell script to delay the launch of Explorer.exe until the system is ready for it.

How has Satya Nadella not been fired for this dumpster fire of a rollout?

probably saved some cash there from replacing human coders with an llm, by the looks of it.
Because all of them have AI shares.
Because line go up
Because everyone left at the company is as bad as he is or worse?
- They do still have John Savill and Mark Russinovich but they are both focused on Azure. They really need someone like them on the Windows side.

Perfect, you've got it, freeze the code base.

Jesus fucking Christ... Is Microsoft literally vibe-coding everything now? Do these updates not go through any rigorous testing at all before being released into the wild?

The only solution is to re-image?? This is just flat out fucking awful.

Sorry to all those people who went for the LTSC versions of Windows. How the living fuck does this kind of stuff happen.

A lot of what the other comments have said is right, but also add that to on top of all the layoffs theyve had and they keep telling their devs to double their efforts. Its been in so many meetings that at this point a single engineer should be able to do the work of the whole company...
the shareholders keep demanding doubling pace from their engineers but they just wont listen smh
They should just fire all the engineers already theyre clearly slacking off /s
- Add on top of it that they’re forcing engineers to use AI to try and magically bridge this gap and you get a lot of slop like this.
In a way they are. Their QA was sent overseas and at some point was cut down to basically skeleton crew.
Every engineer at MSFT was recently ordered to use AI.
The bulk of where MSFT makes money is not from its OS but from selling your data and being a cloud provider. They don't really care about the user experience anymore and that has very clearly shown to be their lowest priority for a few years on now.
It's less the vibe coding and more: this is what happens when you have the developers do all the QA and fire the actual QA staff.
They've been screwing up the Windows updates since Windows 10, vibe coding wasn't a thing at that point.
- I remember hearing about this shift of theirs way back in the early Windows 10 days and thinking, “That sounds like suicidal stupidity but maybe there’s something I don’t know?”
  Nope. It’s exactly as I thought.
Do these updates not go through any rigorous testing at all
Lol no, MSFT infamously dropped their entire Hardware QA team after WIndows 7 and instead relied on the also infamous insider hub to get QA "feedback" from home users instead, leading to the also infamous Windows 8 disaster and slightly less infamous critical CVEs that went unaddressed because MSFT ddidn't even bother to read the insider hub posts.
Oh and they didn't learn anything and kept running with the insider hub well into Windows 10 & 11.

vintage 🤌

So it's a botched update not a desigbed feature.

It's Microsoft, same thing.

For a second I thought this was about forcing people to AI interact with the Start Menu.

relaxes in Linux

dmenu suddenly stops opening
- relaxes in XFCE

We have hundreds of devices running this exact described situation, and we’ve not run into a single instance of this. Is this just one guy on Reddit complaining and the media ran with it?

Per the Microsoft KB for it, this only happens if Windows updates are installed before a user logs in for the first time. So basically re-images and especially VDI environments are at risk of this happening.
It's blogspam. You can click through to the original article. It only happens in certain environments.

Ah. Welcome back Windows 8.

Sounds like this affected a very small number of users. Anyone see this themselves?