What to put on menus in Kubuntu

[Jonathan Byrne]

In a previous mail, I wrote:

>> And of course, if there's anything wrong with KDE it's that there are
>> just too many things on the menu (and they all start with K :-p), so
>> other things could be removed to make room for a good firewall GUI.
>> KDE but with nice brief menus a la standard Ubuntu would be really
>> helpful for many users, I think.

To which Chris Halls replied;

>Yes I agree.  The question is, what to remove?  Suggestions are 
>welcome, maybe start a new thread to discuss it.

I thought about that for a while, and I think rather than asking "What 
to remove?" the question should be framed as "What to put in?" with the 
base guideline that no more than one thing (or sometimes two, if it 
seems genuinely most appropriate) from a given category should go on 
the default menus.

One media player. One office suite. One mail client (I'll plug Kontact 
or just Kmail while I'm here <g>), etc.  One of the many great things 
about Ubuntu is the lack of menu clutter; I love KDE, but as I noted 
above, it does suffer from menu clutter. Severe menu clutter.  Taking a 
"one thing in each category" approach is one good way to fix that.  
There may be others, I'm open to suggestions.

People could of course install anything they want from Universe (and I 
tend to go the kitchen sink route), but a good, functional minimal set 
of items would get people new to Linux and KDE off to the same great 
start they get from mainline Ubuntu.

As for how to decide what that One Thing will be in each category, we 
could take suggestions and take a rough vote on the list and go with 
what most people favor, or if need be, have actual voting on the 
website.  Alternatively, I wouldn't mind just leaving that choice to 
the developers, with advisory input from the kubuntu-users list.

Finally, I'm glad to see traffic picking up a bit on the kubuntu list, 
and the KDE 3.4 packages are great! It provided a real speed boost, it 
was like a CPU upgrade :)

Cheers,

Jonathan
--
Jonathan Byrne <jbyrne at frontbridge.com>
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FrontBridge Technologies, Inc. <http://www.frontbridge.com>

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