Opinions welcome: Restructuring the system menus

[Jeff Spaleta]

On Dec 16, 2007 10:50 AM, Stewart Adam <s.adam at diffingo.com> wrote:
> As well, I've got 29 applications listed under 'System Tools'. I
> understand that not everyone does because it obviously depends on which
> packages you have installed, but many entries do similar tasks
> (Terminal, Konsole, Konsole Super User Mode). A lot of space could be
> saved by putting them into a submenu.

submenus... by default for all usage cases?  I don't think this makes
any sense at all. How common is it to have KDE and GNOME installed?
Are we talking about fixing an issue that maybe 1% of userbase has to
be annoyed by?  And if we did have submenus are you talking about
hiding all similar applications down in a submenu exposing no
application choices at all in the System tools menu? That also seems
very wrong for a default.  Doesn't pretty much mean people are going
to reach for alacarte to place their prefered applications in the
higher level menu to avoid navigating the submenus for every
application?  I don't see how pushing duplicates into submenus by
default avoids the need to customize the menu layouts thanks to  the
bounty of too many choices.

What we need to do is start tracking things like recently used, or
most used, or preferred in a meaningful way on a per user basis to
give users the ability to quickly access things they (or the community
at large) commonly use. Isn't the online desktop initiative playing
around with that sort of application sorting?

For multi-seat... don't we already have sabayon for administrators to
tailor exactly what the initial desktop experience setup is for a new
user on the system?  With sabayon the admin can make a judgment as to
what the menu configuration should look like, capture that in a
profile and use that profile when the user is created on the system,
doing the customization of the menus just once.

I'm really not sure there is a good fit default menu configuration
that is going to please a large enough segment of the community.
Consistent use of generic and program names, I think we can all agree
helps avoid confusion, but I'm not sure there will be consensus on
what a default menu should look like for a cluttered install which
deviates from a default selection of packages for in Spin.

-jef