Re: [Usability]Keeping the Quit menu item

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

On Wed, Mar 19, 2003 at 02:24:34PM -0700, Joshua Adam Ginsberg wrote:
> Wait, wait, wait... have I been living in a cave? We're *abandoning* the
> idea of having Quit in the menu?!
> 

The user model for "Quit" involves the idea of a process. If you don't
know what a process is, you can't understand what that menu item does.

Do we expose "process" anywhere else in the UI? Not really.

gnome-terminal for example can use a separate process for each window,
or not, depending on --disable-factory command line option, and it
looks the same to users either way. Nobody ever complains about that
or wants to quit all terminals at once. In fact the only complaint I
get is confusion where people expect a process per-terminal, because
they're used to xterm. I use --disable-factory most of the time myself
for robustness.

A web browser could easily work either way as well, right now they all
work like "factory mode" but there's not any special reason why, other
than efficiency. If an app was fast and small enough it could easily
just start a new instance for each window for robustness reasons.

There's no reason we can't have one process that implements several
windows that look like different apps to users, even. 

The user visible concepts are "application" and "window" - where most
likely each toplevel main window plus its dialogs should be an
"application" (in implementation terms, share a group leader window).
There's no user-visible concept of a process.

It only makes sense that if you close a main window, its dialogs and
toolboxes will close also, so you don't need Quit for that.

I don't really buy the memory argument; Linux (or any sane unix) is
fully capable of swapping out apps you aren't using, at least if you
put them on another workspace or minimize them so they never get
redrawn. If an app is swapped out it's not going to be slowing down
whatever you're currently doing.

Basically, if you can't explain the Quit menu item without invoking
the idea of a process, then you can't explain the Quit menu item at
all, because processes are not in the user model.

Havoc