I'm more conflicted about Windows 10 than I have been about any previous version of Windows. In some ways, the operating system is extremely ambitious; in others, it represents a great loss of ambition. The new release tries to walk an unsteady path between being Microsoft's most progressive, forward-looking release and simultaneously appealing to Windows' most conservative users.

And it mostly succeeds, making this the best version of Windows yet—once everything's working. In its current form, the operating system doesn't feel quite finished, and I'd wait a few weeks before making the leap.

From highs to lows

Windows 7 was a straightforward proposition, a testament to the power of a new name. Windows Vista may have had a poor reputation, but it was a solid operating system. Give hardware and software vendors three years to develop drivers, come to grips with security changes, fix a few bugs, and freeze the hardware requirements, and the result was Windows 7—an operating system that worked with almost any hardware, almost any software. It was comfortable and familiar. Add some small but desirable enhancements to window management and the task bar, and the result was a hugely popular operating system, the high point of the entire Windows family's development.

Windows 8 was similarly easy to understand. With it, Microsoft wanted to make Windows work well on tablets while also wanting an operating system that continued to support the enormous legacy of Win32 applications.

Windows 8 did both of these things—just not at the same time. It contained the basics of a very competent tablet platform, with particularly strong handling of multitasking. It also contained, in most regards, a solid desktop operating system that was very similar to Windows 7. Some things it even made a little better; in Windows 8, for instance, the taskbar finally became multi-monitor aware, ending the need for various third-party hacks.

But these worlds collided in an ugly fashion. The tablet part was never self-contained, with touch users forced to visit finger-unfriendly desktop apps to access a full range of system settings, manage files, and so on. And many desktop users resented being forced to use a full-screen application launcher that, while perfectly functional, was clearly designed for touch users first.

This operating system showcased some of Microsoft's worst habits. Windows has always been a frustratingly inconsistent platform, sporting a mix not just of visual styles but also of user interface elements. It contains, for example, multiple different styles of "menu." While these all do roughly the same thing, they differ both in how they look and in some of the finer points of their behavior. Windows 8 introduced yet another new and very different appearance and set of interface elements to Windows, with no effort to unify and integrate.

Make no mistake: Windows 8 wasn't the first Windows version to contain a ton of inconsistencies. It's a longstanding Windows problem. Part of the issue is legacy compatibility. For example, some bits of Windows still use the old-style applet Control Panel system, where settings are configured in grey tabbed dialog boxes, because third parties could add their own tabs to provide extended functionality. Other settings didn't have to support this kind of extensibility and so migrated to the new Explorer-based Control Panel system, where settings could be changed within the Explorer window itself, not separate pop-ups.

But part of the issue is also that Microsoft doesn't seem to care a whole lot about these details. Windows 8 introduced a third style of settings, with its touch-friendly Metro-style settings app. It was very incomplete. Lots of settings required the use of the traditional Control Panel (and sometimes its even older tabbed dialogs), not because Microsoft couldn't migrate them to the new style to retain compatibility with extensibility APIs, but because the company didn't make the effort. This kind of work requires lots of new settings pages to be designed and tested, and Microsoft has never really seemed to prioritize it. After all, it isn't making Windows do anything new, it's just changing the way it does existing things.

Windows 8 took this incoherence too far; the differences were too jarring, the inconsistencies too great. It didn't feel like a complete, fully thought-out operating system, instead being some ideas (an adaptable operating system for both tablet and desktop users) and some partial solutions (the Metro-style apps, live tiles) flung together with little consideration of how this would feel to use.

If Windows 7 was a high point in Windows' life, Windows 8 and 8.1 were considered by many to be a low point. Nearly three years after the initial release, the two Windows 8 versions stand at around 15 percent market share (according to Net Market Share), while Windows 7 stands at more than 60 percent.

Microsoft continually tries to put a positive spin on this situation, saying that consumer satisfaction among Windows 8 users is the highest Windows has ever had. But there's an important proviso: it's true only on touch devices.

Since Windows 8's launch, touch PCs have proliferated, and while there was some initially awkward experimentation, manufacturers today have a decent idea of how to do touch systems. While there's still some skepticism about the value of touch on a desktop PC, on laptops it's an attractive feature, especially when paired with perhaps the best form factor innovation that has come from the Windows 8 experimentation: the 360-degree hinge. As an occasional business traveler sitting in misery in cattle class, the ability to use a laptop in "stand" mode or "tent" mode for watching movies is genuinely useful. Touch makes it practical.

Similarly, devices such as Microsoft's own Surface Pro 3 have found a small but growing audience. Its combination of touch, pen, and keyboard has won plaudits, and, while it's still early days, it looks as if Microsoft is starting to build a small but credible PC hardware business.

Which all means that Microsoft's broad desire with Windows 8 was perhaps not entirely off-base. Touch systems are not some discrete category entirely disjointed from more traditional machines. Rather, there's a continuum of devices, ranging from the dedicated mouse-and-keyboard machine through to the tablet that may occasionally be paired with a Bluetooth keyboard and all the way on to the smartphone, which will almost never use anything but touch. Microsoft continues to want to make Windows an operating system that works across this spectrum—and the dream lives on in Windows 10.

Re-embracing the desktop

But first, the company wanted a operating system that wouldn't scare off traditional desktop users, one familiar enough that enterprises wouldn't incur significant training costs. Home users should be able to pick it up as a natural evolution of Windows 7.

To prove to the world that the company has done this, we have the Windows 10 Start menu.

Microsoft is saying that, in Windows 10, the "Start menu is back." It's peculiar messaging. For the many Windows users and enterprises that stuck with Windows 7, of course, the Start menu never went away. For those of us who adapted to Windows 8 and 8.1, its non-presence wasn't such a big deal.

It's also not really true. If you want something that looks and works like the Windows 7 Start menu, then the only Microsoft-supported solution is to run Windows 7. What we have in Windows 10 is something else. Something new. And something sort of broken.

Windows 8.1 addressed some of the major complaints about Windows 8's Start screen—it reinstated the Windows button, for example, rather than requiring the use of an invisible hot corner—but one characteristic of the Start screen was deemed by many to be wholly inappropriate for desktop usage: its full-screen nature. It is this that the Windows 10 Start menu primarily addresses. On mouse and keyboard machines, pressing Start shows a thing that's more or less the same size as the Windows 7 Start menu.

The layout is quite different, however. The righthand side is used not for quick access to your user directory, Control Panel, and a few other places. Instead, it's used to show live tiles, just as were found on the Start screen of old. The left-hand side is closer to Windows 7; it's used to show recently used and new apps and has an "All apps" view that is supposed to show all the apps you have installed.

A new Start menu, not necessarily a better one

However, this is not the All Programs view of Windows 7 and below. In every Start menu-equipped version of Windows, from Windows 95 to Windows 7, the Start menu was driven by a set of folders and shortcuts on the file system. Those folders and shortcuts were all reflected in the Start menu, including their hierarchical organization. As such, organization of the Start menu was user-controlled. Many stuck with whatever random folders applications created when they were installed, of course, but some created their own elaborate hierarchies and structures to group their applications in whichever way they felt was appropriate.

In Windows 10, it's... different. Windows creates a per-user database containing all the entries that are in Start, both the live tile portion and the All apps portion. This database is (inexplicably) maintained by a system service running as the super-privileged SYSTEM identity. And at the time of writing, this database has the oh-so convenient feature of being limited to around 500 entries.

On fresh Windows 10 installs you'll probably never notice the difference, since it'll take some time to build up 500 or so entries. On my main PC with a full install of Office 2016, the Adobe Creative Cloud suite, Visual Studio 2015, Visual Studio 2013, and many more applications besides, I blew right past this number. The result? The All apps view didn't show all my programs. This would be tolerable if that's all that happened. Stupid and annoying, but tolerable, because since Windows Vista, I've launched apps from Start in exactly one way: by typing the name of the app to search for it. I don't really care about All apps at all.

Except that searching breaks, too. For search-to-start apps, Windows appears to use the same database. If that database is incomplete (because you have too many entries) then too bad, so sad; it won't find your apps and you'll have no good way of launching them.

Better yet, even if you reduce the number of apps to below 500 or so, it doesn't fix anything. There's no easy way to make it re-read all the short cuts in the Start menu directory (that still exists, because it's where installers expect to put their icons) to regenerate the database. This problem has bitten me and a few others.

I'm hoping that Microsoft will release a patch soon, because it's quite debilitating right now. And the entire thing perplexes me. In principle, the upgrade floodgates are going to open now that Windows 10 is officially out. I daresay that most Windows versions never have many people upgrade them. Upgrading is always an option, of course, but mainstream users tend to keep the operating system that their hardware came with. Even among those who switch operating systems, many prefer clean installs to the in-place upgrades. In clean installs, the 500 entry limit is going to be hard to hit.

But Windows 10 promises to shake that up. In-place upgrades to Windows 10 should be abundant. Even Windows 7 systems that may have been in regular use since 2009 will be offered the upgrade. And this means that people are going to have machines with lots of apps installed. Windows 10's new Start menu is going to deny them access to some of those apps.

The entire design of the database system is baroque. I can perhaps see some justification for the database itself; for the live tiles portion of Start, there needs to be a record of what tiles you have and how you have arranged them. For search, you probably want some kind of cache rather than crawling through the file system every time someone tries to search for an application.

But using a service to maintain this database (rather than a regular user process) and making the entire thing opaque with no easy means of altering it or modifying it... it's bizarre. That the database doesn't track changes to the file system and remain up-to-date is weird. And that the database has such a ridiculously low limit on the total number of apps is inexcusable.

This new design also appears to break things that were possible in Windows 8.1. In that operating system, the Start screen layout was maintained by the Start screen itself, and it was possible for administrators to roll out standard sets of pinned tiles to systems they were deploying. Admins could, for example, pre-pin line-of-business apps. Windows 8.1 also supported syncing the Start screen between devices; the capability is gone in Windows 10. Quite why Microsoft felt it necessary to gut the Windows 8.1 All apps and tile view is beyond me. The Windows 8.1 system worked. The new one doesn't.

The live tile portion of the Start menu is straightforward. Since Windows 8.1, live tiles have been spruced up a little; they have a new animation for flipping between pieces of information, and there's a new double height, double width square size available. The Start menu can be resized by dragging its edges; if you want more live tiles, you can make it bigger, and if you don't care for them at all you can get rid of all of them and eliminate the space they take.

I continue to like them; they provide a convenient dashboard for things like news and weather (I have come to enjoy the steady stream of nearby murders and assaults that Cortana's tile tells me about since moving to Brooklyn) and are great for keeping track of appointments. They're genuinely more useful than plain icons, or even icons with a counter in the corner.

While I'm unhappy with the specific details of how the Start menu has been implemented and the bugs that it has, I think it's going to achieve Microsoft's goal of reassuring traditional desktop users handily. While it's not an exact clone of any previous Start menu, it's close enough to seem familiar. The addition of the live tiles makes it better.

I'm also not sure it represents quite the victory that Start menu fans think it is. The Start menu continues to be a problematic user interface. It simply doesn't scale very well. Even if all my icons were showing up correctly—and I'm sure they will eventually—All apps view represents a poor way of finding the icon I'm after. Windows 10 does nothing to really make it any better.

Arguably, the Start menu took a big step backward with Windows Vista, which replaced the conventional fly-out menus used in Windows XP and below with the weird expanding-in-place scrolling list. Fortunately, searching was also introduced in Windows Vista, and that works well (though again, it's broken for me until the icon limit is relieved). That's a big part of why Windows 8's Start screen never really offended me; the change from a menu to the tile view didn't change how I launched programs. The process was the same: hit the Windows key and start typing. I'm convinced that this is far and away the best way to start programs on Windows.