Top 3 C++ start-menu Projects

Open-Shell-Menu

255 6,212 6.6 C++

Classic Shell Reborn.

Project mention: Windows 11 Start menu ads are now rolling out to everyone | news.ycombinator.com | 2024-04-24

I've been very happy happy with https://github.com/Open-Shell/Open-Shell-Menu as a Start Menu replacement. If ads have rolled out to my Windows install, I wouldn't even notice.

Classic-Shell

14 665 0.0 C++

Original code of Classic Shell (v4.3.1), original author Ivo Beltchev

Project mention: Windows XP 2024 Edition is everything I want from a new OS | news.ycombinator.com | 2024-01-07

I'm using Win10 Pro, and I have no ads, no problems with unwanted apps, a sane start menu, and I run almost all non-ms software on top so microsoft's incompetence there is a nonissue. I can also replicate this on win11 but I don't see a reason to upgrade.
The way there is fairly simple, actually:
OOSU Shutup10: this removes pretty much all the annoyances. https://www.oo-software.com/en/shutup10
Classicshell: Microsoft is never going to make a start menu that doesn't suck again, but others will. http://www.classicshell.net/
Everything search: classicshell comes with a pretty decent windows search replacement, but you should use this instead. It is so, so fast. https://www.voidtools.com/

InfluxDB

www.influxdata.com sponsored

Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale. Get real-time insights from all types of time series data with InfluxDB. Ingest, query, and analyze billions of data points in real-time with unbounded cardinality.
ValliStart

7 385 0.0 C++

A start menu to replace the un-customizable one that you have right now.

NOTE: The open source projects on this list are ordered by number of github stars. The number of mentions indicates repo mentiontions in the last 12 Months or since we started tracking (Dec 2020).