menu editing

[Darryl Rees]

Is everybody still working on desktop interoperability here? :-)

Whatever solution needs to be flexible enough to cope with different 
kinds of needs.

Keep in mind:
(a) corporates need to do customization
(b) graphic artists, musicians and software developers do need different 
menu setups and may be sharing the same machine (or the same corporate 
standard of a distribution). If I have 20 music/audio apps or 20 image 
editing apps I would organize them differently than if I had 2. 
Computers that try and outguess users are damn annoying, and when you 
can't override the guesses it is infuriating.
(c) not all programs get menu installation right or even install menus. 
In gnome, pdf and postscript viewers are under graphics???  what the 
hell are the criteria for 'accessories', or 'other'.
(d) customizing your menus is a geeky thing to do precisely *because* it 
is so difficult, on all systems.

btw, there are solutions to your wife deleting the launcher but not the 
app. eg. in your menu-editing ui have a list of apps currently not in 
the menu. Alternatively (or in addition), deleting a launcher 
automatically pops up your package manager asking if you want to be rid 
of the app.

Bye
Long.

Mike Hearn wrote:

>>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
>>    
>>
>
>_______________________________________________
>Xdg-list mailing list
>Xdg-list at freedesktop.org
>https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/xdg-list
>
>  
>