press and release windows key, type the name of the application you want, press enter.
same as windows 7.
why would I need a different shell? last time I tried one, almost 20 years ago, it crashed continually and was therefore completely useless. same with all of the stardock software I bought. garbage, all of it.
Except that if it doesn’t find thr application it will search Bing if you aren’t using Windows 10 Enterprise. This can’t be turned off unless you edit the registry. I was furious when I figured this out.
Years ago I found a great Chrome/FF extension called "Bing2Google" where any search from the start menu that gets sent to either browser is automatically re-directed to Google instead. I was more furious when they changed that to always open Edge instead of your preferred browser.