Stardock Delivers Start11 Release Candidate

Windows 11 users who are understandably unhappy with the new Start menu now have a compelling new alternative from Stardock. Start11, now available in release candidate form. This follows the original beta release from early August.

“We put the first beta out quickly in order to regain some of the lost functionality from the Windows 11 Start menu,” Stardock CEO Brad Wardell says. “For this release, we’ve added several new Start menu layouts to choose from, restored context menu functionality, enabled repositioning of the taskbar, plus one of our users’ favorite features: Fences integration.”

New features in the Start11 Release Candidate include:

• Returning the Start menu to the appearance of previous versions of Windows
• Enhancing Windows 10 and Windows 11 menus with new functionality like pages
• Repositioning the taskbar to the top of the desktop for Windows 11
• Windows 10 style taskbar context menu for Windows 11
• Windows 10 users can select a Windows 11 style menu
• Improving the classic and modern search experiences

I’ve been using the Start11 Release Candidate since yesterday and it is a huge improvement, over both the beta and the horribly limited stock Start menu in Windows 11. You’re going to want to check this one out. Among the improvements I’ve noticed is that the two Start menu sections—called Pinned and Recent documents (yes!) in Start11—resize accordingly based on how much content is there, as seen above. Awesome.

You can learn more about Start11 and download the Release Candidate from the Stardock website.