>None of them can group icons by functional usage,

>> I really have no idea what this means as that's never my workflow, but it could be a valid complaint. I just hit the start/meta key, type the 2-3 letters of my desired app/file, then hit enter.

Right, its fine for you, and I'm happy for you because your workflow doesn't involve having a machine with 100's of applications installed that you can't remember the name of because you use them once every couple years. For example I have a cdripping application installed its categorized under "media->rippers". If I type "ripper" into my application search box (this is win7) my cdripping app doesn't show up, if I type CD in, it doesn't either. Because its called "audiograbber" and its quite nice, and quite old too, because its from a time when people ripped CD's by the car load. It still works fantastically, and once in a while I click the "used cd" option in amazon and buy one for $2 because they are cheaper than the .mp3s. And for some reason I can't ever remember its name (rather I mentally think of a couple of its competitors).

Listing everything alphabetically or showing a giant pile of icons doesn't work for me. Which is funny because I can drive a unix machine from the command line all day, but even then I still reach for the KDE start menu sometimes.

And I'm sure your happy with the task bar too, which I find helplessly useless because I've been putting my windows task bar across the left hand side of my screen with textual descriptions for 25+ years. That allows all the terminal windows/etc to stack up and have their machine/menu descriptions visible on the left 1" or so of my screen when I hit the windows key or mouse over there. I don't have to mouse around or alt tab for days to go through the 100's of firefox and putty windows I accumulate over the space of a couple weeks.

Similarly I think MS devs should have mouse free weeks where they are forced to navigate the OS using only the keyboard, since that is the primary input device of a _desktop_ os. If I want a tablet OS I will get a android/ios tablet instead of a 1/2 functional windows one. At least on those I can categorize my games separate from my CAD/EE apps, and my media production tool set.

That same desktop has what works out to ~7K x 5K worth of screen real estate, and don't get me started how broken windows is now with that kind of space.

So, while I think integrating tablet and desktop UI's is a reasonably good idea, what has happened is that MS no longer has a desktop OS. Its a bad version of 2010 era iOS. The UI isn't scalable or usable for heavyweight desktop use, its largely a toy, not ideal for large scale server deployments, not a good tablet OS, and now its not a good desktop OS either. For all the shit windows 8 got, the idea of having a "desktop->tablet" switch wasn't all that bad compared with what we have now.

None of the constant MS churn was a problem, when the old options were buried under some menu item, or in a registry hack, or sitting on the disk somewhere (progman anyone?, that thing shipped for what 15 years after it was deprecated, and still probably runs on 32-bit windows). The problems started when MS decided they were going to wholesale rip things out without regard for how people were using the OS, and then fail to provide a replacement.