Re: Menubar (and Empty Default Desktop) Proposals for GNOME 2.10

[Frederic Crozat <fcrozat mandrakesoft com>]

Le vendredi 19 novembre 2004 à 11:52 +0000, Ross Burton a écrit :
> On Fri, 2004-11-19 at 20:43 +1100, Jeff Waugh wrote:
> > > Right now, I have 18 windows open across 5 workspaces.  18 is actually a
> > > pretty low number for me.  Of these 18 windows, exactly zero of them are
> > > maximized.  None of them are entirely self-standing for me.  The only
> > > two that come close are Evolution and Epiphany.
> > 
> > How big is your monitor and pixel resolution?
> 
> I'm with Shaun, I never maximise windows and instead manually tile so I
> can see Devhelp and emacs in one desktop, have web, email, and IRC in
> another desktop, and Gossip chat windows were required.  On a 1024x768
> 12" display.

I think almost each user has a different way of handling windows, and
power users are another kind of beast :)

If you use computer all day long, you don't deal with windows the same
way if you just need to send a email or surf the web.

For instance, at work, I use 4 workspaces :
-workspace 1 : evolution maximized
-workspace 2 : pan maximized
-workspace 3 : epiphany maximized
-workspace 4 : xchat + vim + 2 gnome-terminal (each terminal having
several tab), all equally splitting desktop space

On the other hand, at home, I never use workspace, but I still use
maximized apps (if I need to move/copy files with nautilus, I'll end up
switching to workspace 2 to get a empty desktop and access "Computer" or
"Home" icons on the desktop).

> I also think that the Places menu in Ubuntu is pretty sweet, and miss it
> on my stock G2.[68] desktops.  Generally the Ubuntu layout has rough
> edges but is better than the Fedora layout, and far better than stock
> GNOME (sorry Frederic, I'm not used Mandrake since MDK7...)

No offense taken :)

I haven't checked Ubuntu Places very carefully. 

But we need to keep in mind that current GNOME layout is only scaling
well because it is only filled with GNOME apps (well, this is changing
with KDE and other apps switching to XDG). Mandrake (and other distros
like Debian, Fedora, etc..) have other problems, because we want to
display all graphical applications available on the system to the user,
and for this, GNOME layout doesn't scale at all. We have a more complete
(and complex) menu (we changed the layout two distros ago to try to
improve it) which is scaling better but it isn't perfect (see
http://qa.mandrakesoft.com/twiki/bin/view/Main/MandrakeMenu#Menu_Structure for its structure). And since we also target beginners with some products, we also have a "simplified" aka Task based menu system, where no application name is shown (somehow like GenericName).

-- 
Frederic Crozat <fcrozat mandrakesoft com>
Mandrakesoft