I finally upgraded to 11 last week by accident. Apparently one misclick means straight to next version with no cancel. So after the upgrade first thing I did was get o&o shutup10 to kill the spywares.
This is exactly what Microsoft are counting on, that people will simply go "oh well" and just carry on with Windows 11, because any effort needed to move away is too much effort.
Have you succeeded in making things less crappy? I've been debating the upgrade for a while and I'm basically hoping this is possible by the time I do it. I already use shutup10 on win10, but I wasn't if win11 kneecaps it somehow or not.
Start menu is permanently lacking features. But besides that it's not a major change. There is third party softwares that puts back 10 style or other start menus, but heard there are issues with windows updates. Besides that just get shutup10 again and tick stuff off. Pretty much solves it imo.
I thought I already replied to this, but apparently not. Sorry for the late response.
The start menu no longer has the windows 10 tiles. It's just search and icons of apps you've pinned. Similar to phone app menu. You can put some into folders/groups together. And that's it. There's no further customization possible.
You can get third party solution to bring back more features such as Start11 from Stardock, but that means paying for an additional software and I've heard it gets buggy with windows updates.