Start menus [LWN.net]

Start menus

Posted Apr 2, 2012 10:00 UTC (Mon) by pboddie (subscriber, #50784)
In reply to: Free is too expensive (Economist) by elanthis
Parent article: Free is too expensive (Economist)

Application menus have a tighter pointer locality, and when done right (which no, GNOME 2's were not at all right, they were horrible) involved less contextual overhead and wrist strain.

Are you describing the "start" menu here? I checked out the version of GNOME that Debian Squeeze provides, along with KDE 4, and the tendency to throw everything into the start menu so that you not only have simple menus but also a bunch of dynamic stuff haphazardly arranged - you could probably have a weather applet in there as well - which seems to also be a feature of recent Windows releases, resulting in a kind of mini-desktop within the desktop, is just horrible. KDE 4 seemed to elevate this to the level of high art by having iPod-like menus squeezed into the tiny porthole in question. What's wrong with using the 80% of the screen the menu doesn't make any use of?

With such a mess, I can understand people wanting to make more use of the screen to show menus, but I guess that full-screen menus don't really scale nicely to 30" monitors.

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Start menus

Posted Apr 2, 2012 11:10 UTC (Mon) by Seegras (subscriber, #20463) [Link]

He's referring to the MacOS-style global menubar.

Which is, by the way, unusable with sloppy-focus and other things old unix-geeks take for granted ;)

Start menus

Posted Apr 3, 2012 13:29 UTC (Tue) by RCL (guest, #63264) [Link]

> What's wrong with using the 80% of the screen the menu doesn't make any use of?

Because I don't want the rest of my screen obscured when I'm looking for recently used documents in Start menu?

Start menus

Posted Apr 3, 2012 22:25 UTC (Tue) by pboddie (subscriber, #50784) [Link]

Couldn't you allow it to have just some of the 80%, though? Pretending that there's an iPod in the bottom left corner while the rest of the screen goes unused (apart from perhaps showing applets that only distract from the task at hand) seems to be a misallocation of resources.