menu editing

[Mike Hearn]

> Since it seems that mostly geeks organize edit their menus, I think it can be
> more complicated to do so and just let the keyword based nature seep through
> the UI.

Sounds like it might be a self fulfilling prophecy to me, but seeing as
menu editing has been very easy in Win98 and up, and still nobody does
it, it's probably reasonable anyway.

> My wife tends to do this on her windows box (yeah yeah I know, stop laughing,
> she will use linux at some point, she just needs a bit more "conditioning"):
> If she decides she doesn't like a particular application anymore, she deletes
> the icons.  Apparently she knows that this doesn't delete the application
> itself, but she doesn't care enough to go through figuring out how to delete
> an application.

XP tries to do this, not sure how well it works. You quickly get into
the realm of needing reference counted .desktop files though - what if
one member of the family deletes a launcher but another member still
uses the app? I have proposed (not here) a "managed" packaging system,
where the user never explicitly installs nor uninstalls packages,
instead everything is refcounted and managed automatically, like in for
instance Java but quite a few people didn't like it. The idea of an OS
automatically removing software spooked them.

> George