Bug and discussion about ubuntu menu

[Milan Bouchet-Valat]

Ouattara Oumar Aziz (alias wattazoum) wrote :
> Milan Bouchet-Valat wrote:
>   
>> I read what you explained in the bug report, and here are a few remarks.
>> Clarifying the confusion around Preferences & Administration is IMHO a
>> good idea, since every base user seems to have problems with it.
>>
>> Naming them "User Preferences" and "System Administration" can be nice
>> since it's not too hard to change. Though, notice that the parent menu
>> is already named "System", so let's not end up with jokes like Start ->
>> Stop in Windows. If in "System" you have "System Administration" and
>> "User Preferences", this means that "User Preferences" is not a system
>> setting, and thus should not be there in the menu. This can look like a
>> detail, but IMHO it's important that we think of consistency. These
>> strings are also very long, and may not look nice. Maybe you could
>> simply rename them to "User Preferences" and "Administration", the
>> latter makes it quite clear that we're dealing with "hard"
>> configuration. Here I don't have a real solution, just some advice. ;-)
>>     
>
> I thought about renaming "Preferences" to "My Preferences" because "User 
> preferences" might be a very long label for some language.
>   
Good idea - this should not raise any issues and would help much. This
is quite like My Yahoo or other services, people will understand that at
the first glance. Just propose it to upstream GNOME.
>   
>> Please also take care of not doing this change alone - you're aware of
>> that since you asked the list. This should be discussed with GNOME,
>> since they have the same issue. Moreover, PolicyKit is going to add many
>> changes in this domain, and maybe the distinction system-wide/user-only
>> will disappear soon. This will be a real problem while we are migrating,
>> and I'm glad you're caring about this now. Maybe the best solution would
>> be a single Control Center, which already exists. So please see this in
>> a long-term outlook, changes are likely to happen in the newt months.
>>     
>
> This is indeed true. I remember the Gnome Control Center were introduced 
> to replace those two menu sets in feisty then removed after a few days. 
> I think the reason was that a lot of people found that it was slower to 
> access a menu item this way.
>   
I was a supporter of an option so that advanced users can use menus, but
this idea was not very popular. It's true that the default UI should
suit every need we can imagine, but meanwhile, both needs seem difficult
to satisfy.
> A more professional solution would be to merge the configurations GUIs 
> and use policy kit to hide System Wide tasks. But this takes time. I am 
> really wondering if we shouldn't study this solution. Have a single GUI 
> for Printing but hide some options using policy kit ...
> I'll think more clearly about this and I shall write here :-)
>   
I'm not sure we'll be able to hide all system tasks and merge all tools.
There are some that only deal with system settings (log viewer, software
tools...) and others with the desktop (menu prefs, energy, preferred
programs...); others are distro-specific system tools and thus cannot be
merged (easily) with GNOME prefs. We can try to make them the less
numerous possible, though.


Cheers