Kmenu thougths

[Vladislav Blanton]

There some excellent points that have been made, and some not so excellent
ones ;)

> And remember installing
> programms is mostly a task for admins and not for users - they don't even
> care what the admin does.

Inaki made it clear that this is not true! "Desktop" users at home (and at
work!) need to install apps on their own. Why would you assume that people
don't install apps and only sys admins do?  In some cases that might be true
(in the workplace where KDE is forced on to the employee!), but then why do
"Desktop" distro's have package managment (For instance, (k)ubuntu)?

With that in mind, the recently installed apps menu is a great idea because
it is often difficult to find the locaiton of a new program. For instance,
it's not obvious that k3b would be under "multimedia" if you only plan to
burn backups. You'd look under utilities or system and you'd never find it.
etc, etc.

> In general I think it is not THAT useful to discuss kmenu in detail cause
I
> expect the new approach plasma will handle the desktop may have serious
> impact on how we can handle the kmenu
...
> and the current ideas are very
> "locked in" by our traditional idea of having a kmenu (simply cause
Windows
> does it that way?).

I agree but I'm not sure how large the impact of Plasma will be until it is
coded and I think that some good points have been made recenty that are
worth remembering. When plasma is closer to stability then we can think
about the menu even more. (yay!)

Vladik Blanton

On 1/26/06, Sebastian Röder <sebastian.roeder at uni-bielefeld.de> wrote:
>
> I want to command on the ideas regarding kmenu in KDE4.
>
> In general I think it is not THAT useful to discuss kmenu in detail cause
> I
> expect the new approach plasma will handle the desktop may have serious
> impact on how we can handle the kmenu - maybe on the road to KDE4 we can
> "rethink" the idea of kmenu from the ground and the current ideas are very
> "locked in" by our traditional idea of having a kmenu (simply cause
> Windows
> does it that way?).
>
> All the ideas that got collected here seem to me like there is little
> "rethinking" and little explanations WHY the kmenu should transform into a
> certain direction. First we would have to clarify what is the PURPOSE of
> the
> kmenu - well, for me it is (one possible) way to start applications. This
> should be done as fast as possible and even when I do not exactly know the
> name of the app.
>
> In my opinion kmenu is quite good in that already with its clear
> categories
> like "Office, Games, Multimedia, Net". WHY should we move this to a
> seperate
> category called "programms" when I open up kmenu in 90% of the cases to
> start
> one of this apps? What makes things slower, more complicated and is not
> "to
> the point". Such changes should be backed up with good explanations I
> think.
>
> The main problems of kmenu in my are to deep hirachies of submenus and
> entries
> in the "all programs" region that do not realy belong there (e.g. help,
> control center, home).
>
> I second the request for having "logout" and friends NOT moved into a
> sub-category. A area "recently INSTALLED apps" doesn't make sense to me -
> in
> how many cases does a user search for a program my install date and can
> not
> find it by the task-driven categories? And remember installing programms
> is
> mostly a task for admins and not for users - they don't even care what the
> admin does.
>
> For all the administration tasks I would prefer to just open controlcenter
> (which must be seriously improved, I agree) instead of having 100 entries
> in
> the kmenu. Same goes for file opening etc.
>
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--
=     Vladislav Blanton      =
  =  vblanton at gmail.com  =
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