Bastian Venthur wrote: > Personally, I don't use the Debian menu at all. All the important apps I > use have a proper menu entries outside of the Debian menu or are > terminal applications which don't need a menu entry.
I forgot to ask if the people filing bugs with .desktop files intend to
eventually just do away with the Debian menu system. If so it would be
good to make that explicit. I'm looking for _any_ kind of explicit
rationalle or coordinated change.
> The most annoying part of our Debian menu is, that it is too
> complicated.
This is probably true of any menu system when it's scaled up to anywhere
near the number of menu entries and breadth/depth of applications as
Debian's[1].
In the long run, big menus of all the possible programs all obsolete
anyway. A better interface is a tool that helps you search for programs,
and then remembers programs that you've used so you can quickly
re-access them. The command line has been doing this for decades;
desktops are only just starting to catch on to the idea. (And of course
Enrico is several leaps beyond it with some debtags stuff.)
> The first level with the entries: Apps, Screen, Help, Games
> and X-Shells is pretty useless, and adds unnecessary depth to the menu
> tree. It would be a major improvement if we would move the Apps section
> to the root of the tree and sort the remaining sections (Screen, Help,
> Games and X-Sheels) *into* this section.
You should be able to do this on your own system by editing
/etc/menu-methods/translate_menus.
But.. The Appications menu can already have up to 23 submenus, and already
grows beyond 10 on many typical systems. Rather and moving it up and so
having an enormous root menu with 15-30 items, it would be good to
reduce the number of items already in it closer to 10 via deeper tree
structure or more reorganisation. Bearing in mind that menu can flatten
unnecessarily deeper tree structures if the tree is lightly populated.
> Besides that, from my naive-user's point of view I wonder why my menu
> has so many redundant entries? Maybe we could get rid of the Debian menu
> completely and just use the underlying system to create proper desktop
> files for packages not providing their own?
Only problem with that idea, besides .desktop layout likely not scaling
any better than the Debian one, is the large set of window managers and
other programs that are supported by the Debian menu system and don't
understand .desktop files. Of course .desktop files could theoretically
be used as _input_ for the menu system.
--
see shy jo
[1] Disclaimer; I was heavily involved in the initial design of Debian's
menu system.
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