Use Classic Start. I get it through Ninite. It's perfect.
Shift-delete removes the recycle bin portion. If you access the recycle bin as infrequently as most people (read: only when the drive complains about space), you won't really be concerned about an extra confirmation.
Smart locations are pretty frustrating but I don't remember the last time they weren't just folders under the user directory, similar to MacOS and Linux. My Documents is a legacy shim, Simba. You must never go there.
I think the UI conventions thing is a matter of personal preference. I really like applications that use a UI convention that suits the application. PowerPoint and Google Chrome are different apps for different purposes, so they should have different UIs.
The Settings app/Control Panel is unforgivably broken. That said, if you search for what you want in the start menu, it's usually pretty good at finding it. But yeah, the ODBC driver connection dialog from 3.1 is still in there somewhere.
Shift-delete removes the recycle bin portion. If you access the recycle bin as infrequently as most people (read: only when the drive complains about space), you won't really be concerned about an extra confirmation.
Smart locations are pretty frustrating but I don't remember the last time they weren't just folders under the user directory, similar to MacOS and Linux. My Documents is a legacy shim, Simba. You must never go there.
I think the UI conventions thing is a matter of personal preference. I really like applications that use a UI convention that suits the application. PowerPoint and Google Chrome are different apps for different purposes, so they should have different UIs.
The Settings app/Control Panel is unforgivably broken. That said, if you search for what you want in the start menu, it's usually pretty good at finding it. But yeah, the ODBC driver connection dialog from 3.1 is still in there somewhere.