Windows 10 is much better than Win 7. IMO one reason, desktop search that works. Some may consider the reliance on search a UI failure, but I think it has become the dominant organizational principle. The other being pinned apps to the task bar.
No, it's brilliant, in principle. See: spotlight on Mac OS X.
The problem is that Windows Search just doesn't work. I install apps, it can't find them unless they have a start menu enry. I save documents, it can't find them. It does find plenty of irrelevant websites and spurious results from caches, but it misses files sitting directly in my documents folder. Sometimes it returns a result from a partial name hit but when I accidentally type the next character (correctly!) the hit disappears, and it doesn't come back when I remove the offending correct character. It's a mess.
I used to supplement Windows Search with launchy, but then launchy started bugging out. Now I use keypirinha, which intentionally configures bad defaults to encourage you to learn its config file format. Mega cringe. Once you do, though, it does actually work.
...interesting... my experience with Win10 search is the complete opposite, it's so broken that I'm really not sure why there is a search feature in Windows10 in the first place. The only way to "fix it" is to install an alternative start menu (like OpenShell) which has a search box which actually works (somewhat, but better than the default search).
Huh? How does it work for you, and how did you get it that way? To me it has been nothing but useless.
To those who are also looking for a better search solution on Windows: download 'Search everything'. It basically lets you grep on the filenames of all files on your machine, using regexp if you want. It's marvellous.
Problem is that it often doesn’t work. I can type in “calc” and get a list of web links instead of the calculator app. The search box in explorer also sometimes finds things and sometimes doesn’t without any rhyme or reason (at least none that I can figure out).
However, Search Everything is the absolute best search tool for Windows, regardless of version.
Windows 10 search is the most hilariously broken search engine I think I have ever used!
Desktop search is fine and useful for consumers. For someone who uses a machine 8 hours a day, Windows 2000 was great.