Listen, I know we all love to complain about the Windows start menu, and I don't want to beat a dead horse here. But it's hard to deny that the Windows 11 Start menu was a downgrade from Windows 10, and even though Microsoft just recently rolled out an update with some improvements, Windows 10's menu was still better.

Thankfully, there are ways to bring it back, and the best part is you don't even have to pay for it. Thanks to a tool called ExplorerPatcher, you can restore the Windows 10 Start menu on Windows 11 to make it more customizable and more useful to you.

Why the Windows 10 Start menu is so great

It's the best one yet, frankly

While we can all come together in our distaste for the Windows 11 Start menu, I think many would argue that the Windows 10 design wasn't that great, either. After all, tools like OpenShell and Start10 (now Start11) have existed for a while in an attempt to restore earlier designs. But that's where my opinion differs, because I believe Windows 10 actually had the best Start menu design in the history of Microsoft's operating system.

I won't dwell too much on Live Tiles, but they were legitimately cool. Their squared-off design may feel outdated now, but having an app icon that can also double as a widget with real-time information was always a very smart idea, and it could have been improved rather than discontinued.

But the real reason the Windows 10 Start menu was the customizability and speed with which you could get to your apps. Whereas the Windows 11 Start menu is completely locked to its standard size, and previous versions could only be resized vertically, you could stretch or shrink the Windows 10 Start menu to whatever size you saw fit. You could have no apps pinned and see just the All Apps list, you could stretch the menu out to fill almost the entire screen and have dozens of apps pinned to the tile area.

This was taken even further because you could also change the size of the tiles themselves, from a small square, to a larger square (equivalent to a two-by-two grid of the smallest size), a wide rectangle (two-by-four relative to the smallest size), or a large square (four-by-four). You could squeeze a ton of apps into the Start menu's space, or just a few, and it was completely up to your wants and needs. Different sizes could also increase or decrease the usefulness of the respective app's Live Tile, so there was an interesting trade-off to be made. I could even sort them into groups and create folders, which made it possible to organize the apps in a more logical way.

I definitely made use of this and generally made my Start menu as wide as the OS would allow me, creating groups for things like office apps, social media apps, and a couple others. It was fun to organize the menu and it became that much more useful to me. Meanwhile, the current design is part of what pushed me towards using more keyboard-based launchers so I could speed things up.

Bringing back the good old days

ExplorerPatcher to the rescue

If you're like me and you miss the Windows 10 Start menu on Windows 11, you'll be happy to hear about ExplorerPatcher. This tool allows you to customize various aspects of the Windows Explorer shell, which importantly includes the ability to use a Start menu that recreates the look and feel of the Windows 10 version. It's not fully perfect — after all, the functionality for live tiles no longer exists in Windows 11, but from a visual and organizational standpoint, it's fantastic.

The best part is that it's both free and relatively easy to use. If you want to bring back the Windows 10 Start menu like I did, all you need to do is download ExplorerPatcher from GitHub, then run the installer. Once it completes and the app launches, go to the Start menu section on the left-side pane and change the style from Windows 11 to Windows 10. That's pretty much all you need to do, and your Start menu will change instantly. Once it does, you can do all the things you remember from the Windows 10 days. Pin apps from the app list to the tile area, resize tiles, and move them around and organize them as you see fit. Since Live Tiles no longer work, making very large tiles doesn't make a lot of sense anymore, but you can still do it if you want to achieve a specific aesthetic.

On the flip side, ExplorerPatcher offers some additional customization options that Windows 10 didn't have, like being able to choose between rounded corners or the classic squared-off design, as well as choosing between a floating and docked Start menu.

It can do a lot more, too

But there are some bugs

If you're a fan of older versions of Windows more so than Windows 11, then ExplorerPatcher has a few other great features, too. In fact, when I first installed it, the first thing it did was change the taskbar to also match the Windows 10 style, making it smaller, separating some of the system icons, and so on. You can also change many of the taskbar flyouts such as networking, volume, and battery, to the designs used in Windows 10, and sometimes even Windows 7.

One of the biggest features that I find interesting is the weather widget, which is wholly original and lives where the News and Interests feature would normally be on Windows 10. This weather widget has a visually pleasant and useful design, showing forecasts for the next week along with forecasts for the rest of the current day. You can see quite a bit of information just from the widget, so you may not even need a full separate app. It's much better than the weather widget Microsoft offers on Windows 11.

That being said, there are some glitches, too. Sometimes, instead of the weather widget, ExplorerPatcher will load the UI for the old My People feature, which isn't functional anymore and is naturally not the intended behavior. I've also had a couple of visual glitches here and there, but it can usually be worked around.

It's a great tool

Windows 11 does a lot of things right, but it's hard to deny that it also makes a lot of controversial changes not everyone will like. As far as I'm concerned, the Start menu is one of those bad changes, and ExplorerPatcher is one of the best ways to go back to the Windows 10 style, plus it has an array of useful features. If you want to go even further back, then you might want to check out OpenShell, but if Windows 10 is where you feel at home, you can download ExplorerPatcher below.