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> I can’t stand Windows 11.

I feel your pain. :-)

I have a longstanding love/hate relationship with Windows. I run Windows, Linux, and MacOS side-by-side every day, seamlessly, for the work I do. But Windows is in one respect a special case.

I really like the classic Windows desktop, as developed in Win2000 and perfected in Win7. (After that the Windows desktop turned into a pile of poo.) I like the Win7 desktop better than the MacOS or Linux desktops by far.

But the rest of Windows drives me batty at times, whereas I'm more productive in MacOS and MUCH more productive in Linux.

So my ideal computer would be Linux with the Win7 desktop. Alas, it is not to be -- the Linux folks seem to want to copy the Mac desktop instead. So on my Linux machines I use the "FlashBack/MetaCity" Gnome extensions to give me a close-enough approximation of a Win7 desktop.

As for Win11, it's a travesty. I will retire within a few years, and I hope to never have to deal with it directly, other than to help my users who are forced to use it once Win10 goes EOL.

I can’t stand Windows 11.

Yet you can make it like Window 10 easy enough. I am the type of person who likes compact yet expansive menus, and overall enable quick access to programs and places, while improving layout without needing to learn much coding though I have edited the Windows registry a few times, and sometimes used Power Shell to accomplish such.

Therefore I like the the over 200 tweaks available in Ultimate Windows Tweaker for Windows 11 from the Windows club (Windows 10 users should use Ultimate Windows Tweaker 4.8 for Windows 10), as well as Winaero Tweaker and Explorer Patcher and 7+ Taskbar Tweaker beta.

To begin with, Explorer Patcher restores the Windows 11 taskbar to be exactly like Windows 10, and with it I use the Windows 7+ Taskbar Tweaker which provides more customization. Below is two-level (Windows enables this by dragging the top border upward) Taskbar:

Note that most of the buttons are that of multiple Portable Firefox installations, each generally being for its own purpose, from forums to shopping. (Note that to run more than one copy of installations of FF portable concurrently, you need to place a copy of the FirefoxPortable.ini from Other\Source to the main folder of FirefoxPortable and edit the FirefoxPortable.ini to instruct:
AllowMultipleInstances=true)
DisableIntelligentStart=true)

You can also create a Quick launch menu for your taskbar, either for a custom folders or the default Quick launch (buried in %UserProfile%\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Quick Launch) . Right click on your taskbar and hit Toolbars and then New Toolbars and navigate you the folder of your choice,

Add to this Right-Click Extender (add items to many right click menus), plus Open Shell to replace the Windows 11 start menu

Resulting in these expansive quickly accessible layouts (composite image of desktop view in Windows 11: Start and Right-Click menus, default Device manager; task bar via Explorer Patcher.

In contrast, are examples of more limited, spaced out/less compact (though scrollable) default menus in both Windows and typical Linux distros (and the sparsity of the Mint right click menus is not worth showing. Puppy Linux is better)

(Mint):

Yet which is better than the Windows 11 default Start menu (contrasted with OpenShell, on right)

How can anyone think that the default Windows (or Linux) is preferable to what OpenShell enables?: