Menu editor not working

[Liam Proven]

On Thu, 1 Nov 2018 at 03:40, Ralf Mardorf via ubuntu-users
<ubuntu-users at lists.ubuntu.com> wrote:
>
> Ok, so it belongs to the category "you never know".

I guess so.

A lot of the weird stuff around GNOME 3 and Cinnamon starts to make
sense when you realise 2 things:

[1] that the whole environment is built from Javascript plug-ins into
a 3D window compositor. JS is a poorly-defined language which is
currently very fashionable. It's interpreted so it is run via a lot of
just-in-time compilers and other speed-up techniques, which is not
good for stable or predictable behaviour.

[2] it's closely tied into to questionable bits of the modern Linux
ecosystem, such as systemd, Flatpak and so on. This is why you don't
see it on non-Linux free Unixes, and why Cinnamon isn't an option on
Devuan or other systemd-free distros.

> However, editing
> menus based on desktop files, by a menu editor, never was satisfying.

You know what? IMHO, one of the greatest advances in Win95 -- the
original desktop _all_ modern Linux desktops copy -- was the brilliant
idea of having the Start menu defined by a simple directory hierarchy
full of shortcuts (aliases/symlinks).

This of course is the one thing the Linux desktops _didn't_ copy.

All the menu editors I've seen are horrid kludges to get around this fact.

Side note: the current generation of programmers at MS itself don't
appreciate this, which is why it's gone from Win8 onwards.

-- 
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