Fedora Core 2: editing the menus

[Matthew East]

Hi all,

I like Fedora Core 2 very much. But a couple of things bug me and I
thought that I'd see what the list thought. Lemme know if you agree or
not. I am no expert with computers generally, or linux in particular,
just a regular user. However I'm sure that fedora doesn't only target
experts so some feedback from us people may be useful.

I recently installed Mandrake 10 and when going back to Fedora Core 2
these things have become even more obvious.

1. Editing the menus.
As far as I can make out in order to edit the menus, you have to edit
the files in /usr/share/applications. Ok, fair enough, I have done this,
but editing them manually and one by one is a real pain, and
furthermore, it is annoying that the K Menu (I happen to use kde) gives
me the impression that it will work and that I can play around with my
menu. It saves it, but makes no difference ;). The only way I have
succeeded in editing the menus has been by editing those .desktop files
one by one. Perhaps this is a trade-off between usability and security,
I don't know. But it sure is annoying.

2. Language Packaging
In Mandrake they have rpms for the individual languages which allow you
to install languages individually for the system, and best of all, for
openoffice.org. That would be very nice in Fedora too. Perhaps the next
release will do this.

Generally I noticed that with two installations doing more or less the
same things, one of Mandrake and one of Fedora, the latter has more
bulky packages, resulting in much greater disk space after the
installation. At the same time it is rather nice to have packages such
as xine and mplayer. No doubt this was not possible in Fedora for
reasons beyond someone's control. But I have to say that I found
Mandrake slightly more polished from the point of view of usability. The
configuration menus are very nice, and especially the package manager is
easier to use. No doubt this is a question of what the aims of the
distribution are, as has been mentioned in a couple of threads I saw in
this list. But I suppose it's inevitable that these two distributions
will be compared.

I'll see what you people think. If replying, please reply all.

many thanks, Matt