Yep. Trying to maintain a consistent startmenu for computer labs with Windows 11 is annoying.
The layout is stored in an encrypted file that cannot be editted directly. You have to manually setup the start menu on one profile then copy the file to all the others. This works fine for intial deployments, but is a massive pain if you need to add any other apps later.
The old powershell commandlet for importing layouts does not work in Win11. The old group policy settings don’t work either. The actual DLL calls used by the end user to manually configuring the start menu are deliberatly coded to prevent being called from a script.
It is freaky how much work Microsoft has done to prevent scripting changes to the start menu.
The only officially supported method for an IT department to manage the start menu is intune, but microsoft’s device licensing for intune is a mess out folks have yet to figure out.
They’ve overhyped the hell out of it and slapped those letters on everything including a lot of half baked ideas. Of course people are tired of it and beginning to associate ai with bad marketing.
This whole situation really does feel dotcommish. I suspect we will soon see an ai crash, then a decade or so later it will be ubiquitous but far less hyped.