On Thu, Mar 13, 2008 at 12:39 PM, Andrew Watkins <andrew at dcs.bbk.ac.uk> wrote: > Shawn Walker wrote: > > On Thu, Mar 13, 2008 at 9:54 AM, Calum Benson <Calum.Benson at sun.com> > wrote: > >> On Wed, 2008-03-12 at 13:08 -0400, Sebastien Roy wrote: > >> > I also don't see the point in cluttering panels with needless menus if > >> > they're already available through the "Launch" menu. > >> > >> I agree, but currently we don't have the 'Launch' menu on the panel in > >> Indiana... so we need to decide which to go with. (One advantage of the > >> Apps/Places/Systems menus is that broader and shallower menu systems > >> are, generally, easier to navigate than narrow and deep ones.) > > > > I too was initially thrown off when I first saw the "shallow menus" in > > GNOME when I used Ubuntu. > > > > After I got used to it though, I loved it! > > > > I personally am in favour of keeping the Apps, Places, System menus as > > I think they are great for easy navigation. > > > > It's so much better than having one large menu and having to dig > > through it for commonly used things. > > > > I am still a big fan of the old JDS layout and with the one panel at the > bottom and one launch menu. I know it was there to look like Windows XP, > but it works. I know and the end of the day it does not matter since we > can change it to any which way, but I still believe that we should have > a slightly different look and feel than the standard GNOME interface.
If I remember right, Ximian GNOME used to have this "visual preferences" dialog that you would get on first login. It allowed you to easily switch between a set of "default styles" that configured it so that the panel was at the top and bottom, or only at the bottom like Windows, etc. KDE desktops used to do the same thing too, don't know if they still do. While I don't think such a question should be at startup (bad design imo and scary to new users), I think that making it easy to switch between a set of different default layouts would be good to have. Some sort of tool under settings / appearance would be neat. I could see a default layout configuration that was more suitable for CDE users for example ;) -- Shawn Walker, Software and Systems Analyst http://binarycrusader.blogspot.com/ "To err is human -- and to blame it on a computer is even more so." - Robert Orben
