On Wed, Oct 23, 2002 at 08:02:56PM -0400, Luke Seubert scribbled:
> On 10/23/2002 6:50 PM, Joakim Kolsjö at joakim.kolsjo@home.se wrote:
>
> > Okey... this seems nice. There is one thing that i have been thinking about.
> > Are two diffrent menus good, one for KDE and one for Gnome. Or is it better
> > to create one "Debian Desktop" menu that has the same contents in both KDE
> > and GNOME?
> >
> This is an excellent question - probably one worthy of extended discussion,
> though perhaps not here on debian-devel.
>
> Personally, I tend to favor several default menus customized to suit the
> appropriate GUI. One for KDE with best of breed KDE apps. Another for
> GTK-based desktop environments and window managers, such as Gnome or
> Sawfish, etc. with best of breed GTK apps. And possibly, maybe, another
> menu just for for non-QT, non-GTK window managers with just plain X apps,
> like XCDRoast.
I agree with that in 100%. I also think that it isn't good to mix the two
desktops in an environment geared towards newbies. Let them use either one,
not both at the same time - that would mean they will not have (by default,
of course) separate menus for KDE and GNOME. The only exception to that rule
would be the "desktop-neutral" applications like XCDRoast given as an
example above. Otherwise the menus for both environments should look like
this, for example:
Applications
Accesories
Terminal Emulator
Character Map
System Utilities
Change Your Password
Change Your Description
Change Your Language
...
Internet
Web Browser
ICQ Client
Email Client
Entertainment
Games
Mahjongg
Solitaire
Miner
Multimedia
Music Player
CD Player
Movie Player
And what hides behind these labels doesn't matter to our Joe user. They see
the same entries whether they use KDE or GNOME. No need to make the
distinction on the menu level. That has one additional advantage - unified
documentation.
> My reasoning for this follows - KDE, and the GTK based GUIs like Gnome seek
> to be complete systems unto themselves, using a common set of libraries.
> When in Gnome, it is very nice to use GTK apps since those libraries are
> prepped, loaded, and ready to go. Opening up a QT app while in Gnome can be
> rather slow, because some subset of the QT libraries has to load first.
That's one thing, another is the unification of the look - i.e. the aspect
that's the most appealing to the users. It would be, at the very least, a
bit troublesome to ensure that when the user sets their GNOME theme the Qt
theme is set accordingly. Things like RH's BlueCurve just don't make much
sense - they assume people will mix applications from both (or more)
desktops, a wrong assumption IMHO.
regards,
marek
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