this post was submitted on 06 Dec 2025
109 points (77.4% liked)
Technology
77340 readers
2142 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
The article title is clickbaity. It doesn't 'get rid of' the start menu and explorer. It just makes the processes completely hang so you can't open any applications, can't open the menu and can't open task manager to see wtf is going on. You also can't access the shutdown function so you have to manually power off.
This happened to me as I was setting up a Windows 11 / Linux dual boot system yesterday, and the Windows side was behaving as described in the article.
I gave up and just installed Linux alone in the end.
The right click context menu for me has been unusable in certain circumstances for me for the past year or so. It's happened on multiple devices, including corporate issued dell and Lenovo machines. The menu options just stop responding to clicking. After getting fed up with this and all the other crap I didn't ask for, I finally just ripped the bandaid off, ditched dual booting, am now on full single boot Linux mint.
And, it's so fucking refreshing. I finally feel like the machines I built and own are mine again.
Task Manager is launched by the listener in winlogon if you use the Ctrl + Shift + Esc method though, right? I'm pretty sure you can still launch Task Manager, and from there attempt to relauch Explorer, even if Explorer is borked or not running. You'd just have to know how to do that and that you can.
That's what I always do when Explorer's ears inexplicably catch fire and I'm either too lazy or too naively hopeful to reboot.
For anyone following along at home, Windows Explorer is also responsible for displaying the start menu/taskbar. In the example in the article there's something else funky going on inside Explorer, though, because the taskbar and even the desktop icons are all there, it's just not rendering correctly. (Explorer is also responsible for showing all of your desktop icons.)