[Usability] Re: Lightening up the XDG menu

[C. Gatzemeier]

Am Montag, 29. März 2004 03:56 schrieb Boris Goldowsky:

> > > > GNOME and KDE is installed on one computer - the menu becomes
> > > > overcrowded
>
> Since I most often use GNOME, I've manually moved all KDE apps into
> submenus within their categories -- so I can still use them when they
> are the better solution, but each category menu is not so crowded.

...Hold on a second.

Hmm, yes... IIRC XDG menu intended to cure the inconsist menues in different 
DEs, that used to do things at will. Let's not reintroduce the same kind of 
behaviour again, from a user's perspective, by hiding stuff away differently 
according to the DE.

No, IMHO making the menu _easily_ customizable by each involved party, the 
distribution, the system admin, and individual users should be the solution. 
(not everybody changing the same setting but a hierarchy of settings so 
things are not lost with updates)

Each level decides which app one would like to expose the most, but the user 
has the last say and might just drag up his emacs into the top shelf menu 
(from a otherwise rather unfortunate lowly branch). And the user should not 
have to do that again for each Desktop he tries.

I am thinking app specific priority values.

On the other Hand Desktops want to promote their own apps. That is ok, an 
extra menu featuring only the apps taged KDE/Gnome/etc. (with increased 
priority values to bring them up and condense the tree) might do that.

Christian