proposal to remove the "Start Here" icon

[Mike Fedyk]

Owen Taylor wrote:

>On Fri, 2004-07-16 at 19:20, Mike Fedyk wrote:
>  
>
>>Brent Fox wrote:
>>
>>    
>>
>>>I propose that we remove the "Start Here" icon from the default desktop
>>>for the following reasons:
>>>
>>>- It presents the same choices that the Main Menu does, just in a
>>>different way.  This is potentially confusing and inconsistent.  The
>>>Menu is a much faster way to launch apps anyway.
>>> 
>>>
>>>      
>>>
>>But it's nice to have one window with all of the "panels" available for 
>>double clicking on.  It's a pain to have to go through the menu to get 
>>to each pref panel especially on low resolution.
>>    
>>
>
>Just to give some historical background, when we introduced Start Here
>in Red Hat 8 or so, our goal, or at least, my goal, was to deemphasize
>and hopefully eventually get rid of the big panel menu.
>  
>
Thanks Owen,

>For apps there are basically three things the user might want to do:
>
> - Start an app they are
>   already familiar with. Finding an item two levels
>   deep in a big menu is an awful way to do this. You want to encourage,
>   even force the user to make a favorites menu entry for it.
>  
>
Encourage yes.  Force, no.

A MRU and MFU application list in the red hat/start menu seems like a 
good solution.

> - Start an app that they don't know about yet to accomplish a 
>   particular task. The panel menu is an awful way of searching for
>   an app to do a particular task.
>  
>
Yep, but most people have been trained to do that, and concepts like 
"search" don't really seem to penetrate into their psyche. :-/

> - Browse through the apps on the system seeing what cool things
>   they can do. The panel menu is an awful way of browsing apps on 
>   the system.
>  
>
True.  Why not have both?  Windows did this by using base concepts of 
directories and shortcuts.  And it allows the user to modify their menu 
layout with base tools.  Very unix like don't you think?

>   
>I'd much rather see a menu used only as a short list of favorite
>applications and common actions like "logout" and have a real app
>browser for everything else.
>  
>
Well, where is this app browser you mention?  If that's the intention of 
"start here" then it's really missing the desired functionality...

>But I've never been very successful at pushing this point of view...
>  
>
Maybe with some work it can get somewhere.