menu troubles (heh)

[Michael Shigorin]

On Wed, Dec 21, 2005 at 05:53:57AM +0800, John wrote:
> >Single app can be a "music player"; 
> No, many users use more than one computer, and it's important
> to know _which_ mustic player. Imagine a support call:

These aren't "simple" users.

> Wife:
>   Music Player doesn't work!
> Hubby:
>   Which music player?
> Wife:
>   You know, Music Player?

"...that blue one", and Hubby guesses that was Amarok ("big one") 
or bmp ("smaller one") with native themes. ;-)

> atm I'm trying to get Wife to try out my old laptop which
> should be entirely sufficient for her needs, in place of the
> bulky, older Pentium III. Her major lament is, "Why is it
> different?" The laptop is running FC3, the P III Warty.

So the problem is diversity of distros, and it's more apparent 
than the one of music players.

> Probably, email clients illustrate the point better than music
> players.  I use mostly Pine, Mozilla Mail and Thunderbird,
> sometimes Kmail and rarly but not never Mutt and Evolution.
> On OS X it's Mail and Thunderbird.

Definitely but in a little package there's place for only one of
them.  If it's not a MUA Zoo LiveCD or kind of, that is.

It's no first time consideration on my part, and I quite
understand the decision to call apps by functionality-based
tags in default install.  The problems begin with zooing it
with extras of any kind.

Maybe Mandrake approach of "Do smth" menu solves this, didn't
have an opportunity to study users using it.

> They are very different critters, and a user coming from OS X t
> Linux would be in for a very rude shock were any of the of the
> common Linux email clients labelled "Mail."

Heh.  MS seems to have a habit of abusing generic words that way
(not that Apple excels at avoiding it altogether).

Linux folks tend to differentiate things to be at least
searchable ;-)

-- 
 ---- WBR, Michael Shigorin <mike at altlinux.ru>
  ------ Linux.Kiev http://www.linux.kiev.ua/