On Wed, Jul 25, 2007 at 06:57:54PM +0200, Josselin Mouette wrote: > Le mercredi 25 juillet 2007 à 08:54 -0400, Marvin Renich a écrit : > > Gnome and KDE are targeted primarily at desktop users, not servers. If, > > as a desktop user, I install a graphical app on my machine, I *expect* > > to see that app in the main menu. The place where I put important > > and/or frequently used apps is on a panel/toolbar. > > Do you expect to see console applications in the menu as well?
Some of them. The ``mc'' file manager is an example of a console application that I expect to find in the menu. So are the games from the ``bsdgames'' package. The ``fortune'' program is an example of something I do not expect to find there. > All interpreters and shells? No, certainly not. > Window managers? Yes. Some window managers support starting another window manager without terminating the X session, which is an interesting feature. The "window managers" menu entry is only shown in those window managers that have this feature, anyway, so I don't see why it should be hidden in others. Perhaps a menu method implementation should be allowed to place the "Window Managers" menu someplace else than right along with the other menu entries (the "logout" menu in IceWM, or the "System" menu in GNOME spring to mind), but that's about it. > > If a novice user installs an app and then goes to the menu and doesn't > > find it, how is this user supposed to know what to do? > > This bit is correct: someone installing an app can reasonably expect to > see it in the menu. However you are drawing wrong conclusions: > > > This is > > completely *un*usable. The more novice the user, the more important it > > is for the *default* to be for all graphical apps to be shown. Then let > > the individual user decide which ones are important to him/her. > > If the users installs the distribution with default settings or starts a > session on a multi-user setup, he should find a usable menu, not a menu > with all possible applications he never wanted to install. I think you are mixing two distinct matters in this argument. If a user installs the distribution with default settings and finds that too much software is available in the menu, then this is an indication of there being too much software being installed by default. Rather than aiming to reduce the usefulness of the menu system, you should be aiming to reduce the number of useless applications installed by default. If the user starts a session on a multi-user setup that has way too many entries in the menu, then this is an indication of a sysadmin not doing their job properly. Not much we can do about that, except properly documenting (with examples) how a sysadmin can modify the menu system so that they can hide certain classes of applications to certain classes of users. > > Menus, by their nature, are inherently unusable for the most frequently > > used apps, and we should not be trying to make them more usable at the > > expense of making less frequently used apps harder to access. > > Why shouldn't we attempt to make menus usable? Because by making them more usable for the frequent user in the way you are suggesting, you make them *less* usable for the casual user. This is a tradeoff; and since I believe the menu system is mainly meant for the casual user (frequent users have scripts or panel shortcuts or desktop icons anyway, or they know the menu system by heart and don't care how much applications there are), I don't think we should be reducing the usefulness of the menu system for the casual user. > > Menus make less frequently used apps easy to get at, while toolbars make > > frequently used apps even easier; use the right tool for the right job. > > Guess what, toolbars are not used by a good share of users. Guess what, toolbars are used by most users I know of. > Toolbars sound obvious for experienced users, but a novice will never > have the idea to modify the interface that is shown to him; One thing I do not like about the GNOME usability philosophy is precisely this: catering for the novice user is great, but the GNOME usability philosophy caters for novice users *at the expense of experienced users*. If you want to do that in GNOME, go ahead, be my guest; I couldn't care less anyway. And in fact, I installed GNOME on my parent's machine, since I don't want to have to repeatedly explain them too much, so your philosophy has some uses. But please don't expand that philosophy to the rest of the Debian system, where it is totally useless. I'll agree that some things could be finetuned, and that some things simply don't belong in the menu system. But these things are exceptions, and I think most of the applications that are in the menu system currently do belong there. Speaking of "modifying the interface", one reason why I think the GNOME people have the idea that nobody ever modifies their interface is that it is simply too hard to modify the interface in GNOME. Adding an icon to the panel or the desktop should be a drag-and-drop operation. Changing the desktop background should not require me to add the image to a list of background images first before I can pick it from that list. These are useless hoops to jump through; and even Windows has been doing this correctly for about 10 years. -- <Lo-lan-do> Home is where you have to wash the dishes. -- #debian-devel, Freenode, 2004-09-22 -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
