The Start Menu wasn't good because it was never utilized right. Many years before I ever saw KDE, I started organizing my apps in categories (Viewers, Networking, Storage, System, etc., I've refined the list over the years) and found that most apps can be reduced to a single icon, rather than a whole folder with a bunch of icons you'll never use, or only use once (websites, demos, documentation. And the whole "put your app in a folder named after your company" was one of the most user-hostile things ever invented.
Opening the Start Menu only to type something in seems like a useless hybrid of two disparate ways of interfacing with the computer. Once I get it set up, it takes very little effort to keep it organized in a way that's useful for me, as opposed to just being advertisements for the companies who made the software I use. I can find any app I need usually in 4 clicks (Start, Programs, Category, the app I want). That's incredibly fast, at least when Explorer doesn't have to swap in 3 gigabytes or whatever it's always doing that makes it pause for ridiculous amounts of time for the most trivial of operations.
The Start Menu was only ever "useless" because it was never implemented intelligently. Just like that useless shovelware pre-installed on new computers, it was just another place where every company that got access to your computer dumped a whole bunch of crap, most of which was only useful for _them_, not you, the user. Kind of like the \Windows directory back in the bad old days.
Opening the Start Menu only to type something in seems like a useless hybrid of two disparate ways of interfacing with the computer. Once I get it set up, it takes very little effort to keep it organized in a way that's useful for me, as opposed to just being advertisements for the companies who made the software I use. I can find any app I need usually in 4 clicks (Start, Programs, Category, the app I want). That's incredibly fast, at least when Explorer doesn't have to swap in 3 gigabytes or whatever it's always doing that makes it pause for ridiculous amounts of time for the most trivial of operations.
The Start Menu was only ever "useless" because it was never implemented intelligently. Just like that useless shovelware pre-installed on new computers, it was just another place where every company that got access to your computer dumped a whole bunch of crap, most of which was only useful for _them_, not you, the user. Kind of like the \Windows directory back in the bad old days.