The new Start menu offers a larger layout that adapts to the screen resolution, but you don’t have an option to set its size.
Given how large the new design is, I can already hear the complaints about not being able to resize the layout manually.
Since this new layout unifies the interface, it only provides one experience divided into three sections, including “Pinned”, “Recommended”, and “All”.
You will also notice that if you have a mobile device connected to your computer, then the Start menu will also show a toggle to show or hide the mobile sidebar.
Mauro Huculak
This updated layout has slowly made its way to my devices, first appearing on my work laptop sometime in December, and now on my personal laptop earlier this week. It looked like a rather underwhelming update at first. While I started using the Phone Link integration more often and generally find it useful — save for the instances when it stubbornly refuses to connect to my phone for no apparent reason — I don’t see the need for a dedicated panel in the Start Menu, so I immediately disabled this new feature. This aside, nothing much seemed to have changed in the Start layout.
But then, as the update landed on my personal laptop as well, I noticed that the number of icons in the ‘Pinned’ section suddenly changed, with the option to have either two rows of six icons each, or all pinned apps visible. Until now there were three rows of pinned apps in the menu, and I configured the start menu on both my laptops around these 18 apps. It bothers me that it’s now impossible to go back to this setup — well, except by unpinning all other apps after hitting 18.
What’s even more baffling is that my work laptop (on Version 24H2, OS build 26100.7840) retains an option in Settings to choose between a ‘Default’ layout — basically the 3 by 6 grid it had before — and two other layouts, one with ‘More pins’, the other with ‘More recommendations’. Evidently, I had clicked on ‘Default’ as soon as the update hit and never looked back. Unfortunately, as far as I can tell, this is going to be deprecated soon, hence why my personal device never got this setting.
The article mentions a way to hide the ‘Recommended’ section, but from my tests it’s rather inflexible and confusing, as enabling this removes seemingly unrelated features, namely the extra items in Jump Lists when right-clicking taskbar icons. I use these on an almost daily basis to quickly access recently opened Excel files, so it’s impossible for me to justify removing the ‘Recommended’ section if it means giving up on this as well. I don’t quite understand the design logic of merging these options under a single toggle, it feels user unfriendly and poorly thought out.
From where I’m standing this new Start Menu is actually more restrictive than before. Windows 11 remains as frustrating and inconsistent as its early iterations nearly five years ago. As for launching apps, for quite some time I have ignored the built-in Start in favor of PowerToys’ various launcher iterations – Windows Command Palette is currently in active development, replacing the earlier PowerToys Run.
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