Am I the only one who hates the old Start Menu? I find it tedious and useless. I'm all for re-adding a start menu, but it should be one that doesn't suck, like the one in Kubuntu.
Also absent from this list is an updated console. Windows 8 still uses the old DOS shell. You can't even resize the window past 80 characters. It's embarrassing.
Microsoft is trying to push Powershell as a replacement for venerable old cmd, but it's not really a good one - Powershell is an attempt to bolt OOP onto the shell language and interop with the .NET framework.
The problem is that it's horribly confusing to work with - the syntax is bizarrely inconsistent as you switch back and forth between "commandlets" and .NET methods, and the part of the power of plain text is that it's self-documenting and forces simplicity of API. Powershell allows full OOP, which doesn't map well to the need for things to be simple when doing command-line scripts. Also, the Powershell interface lacks the various tools you'd expect from an OOP IDE that let you learn about the objects/methods/whatever.
I do like the absense of the start menu. To me, the big failing of Win8 wasn't replacing the start menu with a fullscreen pseudo-desktop, it was the schizophrenic relationship between the fullscreen pseudo-desktop and the "classic" apps, as well as the bizarre "charms" things and the lack of a conventional taskbar when using fullscreen apps.
Desktops and larger notebooks have enough real-estate on the screen for an always-visible task-switcher, and the "Charms" thing is too touch-oriented.
The old start menu may not be perfect but the new start screen is definitely a step backwards. Over the life of a Windows installation, many, many programs tend to be installed, and almost every single one of them dumps a bunch of icons onto the start screen, which quickly kills its utility for visually identifying an application and launching it. After a while there is so much crap that the only way I ultimately launch anything is by typing to search. At least the old start menu had the concept of hierarchy, which meant I could identify a single start folder for an application, rather than having to wade through the vomit of 3-6 secondary icons that every installer also feels the need to dump on the start screen.
8.1 doesn't push new apps to the screen by default. They appear on the "all apps" screen, where they are indeed grouped (by the old start menu folder presumably, e.g. "Microsoft Office").
Also you can remove apps you don't want from the start screen. It's not supposed to include everything on your PC. It's supposed to be the things you use frequently. They only did the auto-pinning in 8 to increase discoverability, but it added more clutter than value.
I think it's terrible as well. I have 2 21" monitors and I need to look for my apps in the bottom left corner of one monitor using tiny icons. It could be improved greatly, and still be in Desktop mode. Yes, the terminal is terrible as well. And the new Powershell can't be easily resized either.
I didn't hate it, but in Windows 7 I found a better alternative that almost made it redundant.
I have found myself pinning the 20-or-so programs I most often use to the new-style Taskbar instead. I also use Jump Lists and various related tricks all the time. I frequently run many applications at once, I open lots of command prompts and Explorer windows, and with 4 megapixels of real estate on my primary monitor alone, I want these functions one click away a lot more than I need a few extra pixels across the bottom of my screen.
Given that easier-to-use alternative, about the only things that still make me open the Start menu on Windows 7 are searching for programs I don't use regularly and accessing control panels.
My biggest pet peeves in the Windows 7 UI are also dominated by how quickly I can get things loaded so I can start doing something useful:
1. You can't pin starting directories for command prompts the same way you can for Explorer windows.
2. Opening a command prompt from an Explorer window isn't on the context menu by default.
3. You can't pin a Control Panel icon that pops up a menu for accessing the various panels.
4. Running things as Administrator is still clunky, particularly command prompts.
5. I often want to start some combination of applications I use frequently, position their windows in the same way, and then give a specific program the focus ready to start work. This ought to be a trivial use of any operating system's scripting facilities, but it is difficult-to-impossible to set this up for access with a single click from the Taskbar without writing real code using system APIs to do it.
If Microsoft fixed these frustrations and otherwise left Windows 7 exactly as it was, I would buy Windows 9 at full price for every PC I use in a heartbeat. There are several other things they could do that would make me pay much, much more: grown-up command line tools, a robust and standardised framework for installing/updating/uninstalling applications, a more transparent and robust model for controlling access to system resources -- basically addressing the major weaknesses that Windows has relative to Linux or OS X today for power users.
In contrast, I can't imagine any development of the direction they've been going with Windows 8 that would motivate me to run it, and we actively seek vendors who will provide Windows 7 instead for our new computers at present.
It's a bit off-topic, but you can actually make the window larger than 80 characters if you want. You cannot expand it beyond the maximum amount of characters horizontally but you can increase that to anything you want; it's not limited to 80, really. :)
More on-topic: I don't quite hate the Windows 7 start menu, but it could be made better. Unfortunately, Microsoft chose not to improve on a good concept and, in my opinion, ruin things with their new interace. It is one of the main reasons I don't want to switch to Windows 8.
I've been a Linux user at home for a long time now, though, it's thankfully only my work laptop that I need to have Windows on. I have a game computer that has Windows XP and will probably be upgraded to Windows 8 but I couldn't really care less about the interface there: I just want to start games on that machine, nothing else.
You can if you know those good ol' mode-commands. But yeah, no drag'n'resize like on all other platforms unless you install third party software like MinTTY and ConEmu.
You not need to use "mode" command to do it. If you search in the options of cmd.exe, there is a way to set the width in characters, but cmd.exe can't remember it for the next time that you open it (so is useless by laziness).
ConEmu is far better that cmd.exe, but I really wish having Konsole or Yakuake running in Windows.
Also absent from this list is an updated console. Windows 8 still uses the old DOS shell. You can't even resize the window past 80 characters. It's embarrassing.