proposal to remove the "Start Here" icon

[Owen Taylor]

On Fri, 2004-07-16 at 19:20, Mike Fedyk wrote:
> Brent Fox wrote:
> 
> >I propose that we remove the "Start Here" icon from the default desktop
> >for the following reasons:
> >
> >- It presents the same choices that the Main Menu does, just in a
> >different way.  This is potentially confusing and inconsistent.  The
> >Menu is a much faster way to launch apps anyway.
> >  
> >
> But it's nice to have one window with all of the "panels" available for 
> double clicking on.  It's a pain to have to go through the menu to get 
> to each pref panel especially on low resolution.

Just to give some historical background, when we introduced Start Here
in Red Hat 8 or so, our goal, or at least, my goal, was to deemphasize
and hopefully eventually get rid of the big panel menu.

For apps there are basically three things the user might want to do:

 - Start an app they are
   already familiar with. Finding an item two levels
   deep in a big menu is an awful way to do this. You want to encourage,
   even force the user to make a favorites menu entry for it.

 - Start an app that they don't know about yet to accomplish a 
   particular task. The panel menu is an awful way of searching for
   an app to do a particular task.

 - Browse through the apps on the system seeing what cool things
   they can do. The panel menu is an awful way of browsing apps on 
   the system.
   
I'd much rather see a menu used only as a short list of favorite
applications and common actions like "logout" and have a real app
browser for everything else.

But I've never been very successful at pushing this point of view...

Regards,
					Owen

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