This is an interesting project. I have xfce, KDE and LXDE and have looked at unity. I have seen gnome shell, but need to refresh myself on it.
Menus first. We have set up a custom menu to organize what threatened to become a very long set of apps in multimedia, but also to show the user new to art on linux and Ubuntu where the apps might be used and make things less confusing. It looks like our content creation menus will work fine with xfce(where it was developed), lxde and KDE. I think gnome shell also has a menu, though normal operation might not use it. The idea of typing categories or parts of app names is the big thing right now. In fact this method can be used in all the DEs, though not so easy with xfce... an app finder has to be started first. On the other hand Unity does not seem to use a menu layout at all. (Not an XDG standard anyway) In xfce we have gone beyond just adding workflows by adding some direct buttons at the top. I do not think we will be able to do so with the other DEs. To be honest maybe we don't need to do that for xfce either as xfce progresses. So for menus for each DE, I have decided to break the menu into three. I start with a menu that belongs to the session. This includes menu edits that are unique to that DE. It starts by merging in the stock menu for the DE. Then it removes anything that is in the way. Then we merge our workflows last. This lets the DE authors take care of most of the menu. We only take care of the workflow parts. The glue (the file that does the merging) should remain pretty static. If we need a workflow application, I would suggest that we need it for Unity first. Because we will not be able to use a menu for that purpose. It is going to be interesting in designing DE metas to just keep enough of each DE applets to keep the look and feel the user is choosing that DE for. -- Len Ovens www.OvenWerks.net -- Ubuntu-Studio-devel mailing list Ubuntu-Studio-devel@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-studio-devel