Re: [desktop] why kde and gnome's menu situation sucks
Luke Seubert <ls.maillist@verizon.net> writes:
> > Perhaps DD should _think_ about this issue -- for instance, if it has
> > to choose only one terminal program to display in a menu, it should
> > make an `environmentally aware' choice (KDE for KDE, Gnome for Gnome,
> > Joe's Wackyterm for everybody else) -- but it's absurd to base the
> > _whole menu structure_ around such a piddling little detail.
>
> I am not quite sure what you mean. I don't think the whole menu
> structure is being based upon any one piddling detail - but I am not sure
> which piddling detail you mean. Please clarify a bit so that I can
> understand and then address your concern properly.
The message to which I originally responded said:
Daniel Stone <dstone@kde.org> writes:
> personally think GNOME/KDE should offer their own menus, with a submenu
> in each category for "Non-{GNOME,KDE} Applications". I don't see a
> problem with this, i.e. how our KDE3 packages do it.
It's this sort of menus which I don't like.
It's probably the case that presenting every single installed application
in the menus would confuse and annoy some people, so debian menus should
probably allow filtering what is presented.
One filtering criteria could be:
`If there are several apps of type X installed, and one of them is a
"native" application for the currently running windowing environment
(e.g. Gnome or KDE), then only present that one, and hide the others'
[and hopefully the list of criteria would be stored in a file somewhere,
so that I could change it to suit my personal preferences!]
> > [I think that in many case it will be a non-issue because a system
> > will only have the main KDE apps installed or the main Gnome apps
> > installed, not both.]
>
> Good point. This would tend to argue in favor of segregated menus then,
> with GTK apps showing up when one is using the Gnome desktop, and QT apps
> showing up when one is in the KDE desktop. Few newbie type users are
> likely to install both Gnome and KDE, so the menus should be designed
> with this in mind. Do I understand this correctly as your position?
I don't think it's bad to prejudice the displayed menus toward the `current
environment', but I think the difference between the menus displayed when
using a Gnome desktop and those displayed when using a KDE desktop should
be fairly minor -- along the lines of different apps showing up in certain
places, but _not_ rearranging the whole menu structure.
In other words, we should be using a unified Debian menu structure with
appropriate tweaks for certain environments (and in particular, _not_ using
the default Gnome/KDE menu structures).
-Miles
--
`The suburb is an obsolete and contradictory form of human settlement'
Reply to: