Gnome Icons, Gnome/KDE Menus need improvement

[Ivan Gyurdiev]

Dan Williams wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> This is kind of the point.  GTK+ probably should have better menu
> handling, but when you install a lot of packages, those packages are
> going to have .desktop files.  And those .desktop files are going to be
> in the menus.  Therefore, you're definitely going to have a menu that's
> 100 items long, simply because you installed all those games.

Could there at least be multi-column view so I don't have to scroll 
under GNOME?

> The goal of the redhat-menus package and of the maintainers of that
> package is to make the _default_ install (but NOT the everything
> install) be sane and have nice menus.  If you install everything, there
> has to be some place to put it, and you cannot expect users to go to the
> command line to launch things.  Therefore, they go into the menus
> whether we like it or not :(  Which, because some packages install huge
> numbers of duplicate functionality programs, means you have cluttered
> menus.

That's true... but since duplicate functionality will always be an 
issue...how about naming things to reflect that. Having one Movie 
Player, two PDF Viewers and ogle, totem, xine on top of that does not 
look nice at all. I think the program name *and* the description should 
be in each and every program to resolve the issue. For Example: Xine 
Movie Player, Mplayer Movie Player, Ogle Movie Player, Gpdf PDF Viewer, 
Xpdf PDF Viewer... just like Sound Juicer CD Ripper, GNOME Subtitle 
Editor, and TVtime Television Viewer already do...

what do you think about this?

> Using "More" menus is not really the way to go, the way to go is to have
> sane programs that do what you want, and not to have 5 programs that
> each do 75% of what you want but all have non-overlapping features too.

Speaking of duplicate functionality... do you think there will ever be a 
common underlying toolkit for Linux? I'm just hoping some nice day all 
the apps will integrate into the system and the KDE/GNOME rift isn't 
helping any.