MenusRevisited

Revision 6 as of 2005-10-03 09:54:38

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Summary

The Gnome menu system has not had a good review in quite some time. There is some issues that need to be addressed.

Rationale

The Current menu structure is less than ideal in certain places.

Use cases

  • Sally uses Ubuntu because her stepson installed it for her. She is confused by System Tools and System menus. She doesn't understand the separation.
  • Ernie is a car salesman who uses Ubuntu for accounting, e-mail with Evolution, and occasional Web browsing. One day he realizes that there is an "Evolution" item in the "Office" menu that does exactly the same thing as the "Evolution Mail" item in the "Internet" menu. "That's a bit silly", he thinks.
  • Lorelle uses Ubuntu's Text Editor regularly to edit wiki pages before pasting the text into the wiki itself. As a result, she mouses over the "File Browser" menu item several times a day on her way to the "Text Editor" item. One days she decides to try this "File Browser" thing -- only to discover that it does exactly the same thing as the "Home Folder" item in the "Places" menu. "That's a bit silly", she thinks.

Scope

The Gnome menu structure

Design

Feel free to use [https://wiki.ubuntu.com/QuimGil Proposal: System menu reorg for Ubuntu (and GNOME)] if you find it interesting. - Quim Gil

Implementation

Migrate the items out of Applications-->System Tools. Some of them can die, others to Accesories, others to System-->Admin.

Code

Data preservation and migration

None

Outstanding issues

We should probably coordinate with upstream (Gnome) during their 2.14 cycle.

BoF agenda and discussion