Re: [desktop] why kde and gnome's menu situation sucks
On Wed, 2002-10-23 at 09:16, Luke Seubert wrote:
> Ach. This gets into one of the great conundrums that will face Debian
> Desktop - simplicity versus flexibility/configurability/power. It is very
> hard to have both at the same time in many instances.
Right.
> If simplicity is the goal, then Debian Desktop is going to have to select a
> set of choices in the menu which will mean making choices for users -
> period. Invariably, those choices are going to irritate some users.
> Happily, the power users will be able to easily override Debian Desktop's
> default selections and use something of their own. Meanwhile, Debian
> Desktop has to be careful in choosing the default menu hierarchy, so that
> newbies are best served.
>
> Remember, the motto of DD is "Software Which Just Works". Right out of the
> box - no fiddling and no fuss - it just works. Heh - a somewhat radical
> idea for Debian ;-)
Yes, I know :)
But it needs to happen.
What I think we will do eventually is add a single "novice" or "expert"
prompt to debian-installer, towards the end. I am quite aware that user
levels are considered bad from a UI standpoint, but I see it as the only
way to temporarily bridge the gap between Debian's traditional technical
audience and the audience Debian Desktop is targetting.
It will likely affect a large number of things: the default debconf
priority and the menu layout being the two major things I can think of
off the top of my head. For novices, the default GNOME and KDE menus
would be carefully constructed to present only those applications which
would be best suited for novices. We'll let the people on the separate
GNOME and KDE teams decide what those are. Experts will get the
full-blown Debian menu, with all ten million X terminal emulators, fifty
thousand text editors, etc.
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