Re: adding desktop files to misc packages
Le mercredi 25 juillet 2007 à 08:54 -0400, Marvin Renich a écrit :
> Gnome and KDE are targeted primarily at desktop users, not servers. If,
> as a desktop user, I install a graphical app on my machine, I *expect*
> to see that app in the main menu. The place where I put important
> and/or frequently used apps is on a panel/toolbar.
Do you expect to see console applications in the menu as well? All
interpreters and shells? Window managers?
> If a novice user installs an app and then goes to the menu and doesn't
> find it, how is this user supposed to know what to do?
This bit is correct: someone installing an app can reasonably expect to
see it in the menu. However you are drawing wrong conclusions:
> This is
> completely *un*usable. The more novice the user, the more important it
> is for the *default* to be for all graphical apps to be shown. Then let
> the individual user decide which ones are important to him/her.
If the users installs the distribution with default settings or starts a
session on a multi-user setup, he should find a usable menu, not a menu
with all possible applications he never wanted to install.
> Menus, by their nature, are inherently unusable for the most frequently
> used apps, and we should not be trying to make them more usable at the
> expense of making less frequently used apps harder to access.
Why shouldn't we attempt to make menus usable?
> Menus make less frequently used apps easy to get at, while toolbars make
> frequently used apps even easier; use the right tool for the right job.
Guess what, toolbars are not used by a good share of users. Toolbars
sound obvious for experienced users, but a novice will never have the
idea to modify the interface that is shown to him; which is why this
interface must be as straightforward as possible - and that also
includes good default shortcuts in the toolbar.
--
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