On 02/06/2009 03:12 PM, drago01 wrote:

Removing stuff will get people search for the tools in google instead of in the other menu categories.

There must be a better solution than either "leave it as is" and "just present a long list"

Please don't jump to conclusions. Removing stuff from a specific menu doesn't necessarily mean removing functionality.

For example, two things that could[*] be done to the "Screen Resolution" item is to combine it with something else, say maybe the "Appearance" dialog, or even to turn it into an applet which could arguably be more convenient for those that need to adjust it on from time to time.

Another example, the "Assistive Technologies" item has one checkbox and then buttons which launch other items already in the menus, two of which have accessibility tabs already in them. That could surely be re-worked better?

* Note that I am not necessarily recommending any of those, just citing them as examples.

I have been a member of this group for several years. I have not responded or made a contribution because of time limitations. I have taken it for granted that the work that this group has been doing was improving the functionality and usability of Fedora, and for the most part that has been the case. Recently, I have been trying to migrate off of the Windows environment required for my employment to a full Fedora Linux platform. Several of the functions that I took for granted would be there seem to be missing now.

For example: If fc10.x86_64 on a new hardware platform. I am unable to find support for mounting SMB shared file systems. I have a NAS that is SMB based and I would like to do an automount through fstab. Unfortunately, fc10 does not support SMB file systems. This was not a problem with earlier versions of Fedora, and the "mount" man pages still list "smb" as a supported file system. My Thunderbird email directories are on the SMB NAS and I am unable to mount the share to be able to point to the mounted filesystem/directory from Thunderbird on my fc10 installation. This keeps me tied to Windows.

Also, I have a dual boot system with different hard drives for the Fedora Linux and Windows XP. I would like to do a full virtualization and run the Windows under a alternate profile from the same disk that I am using for the dual boot mode. It appears that KVM, the current default virtualization system in fc10 does not support block devices the way that XEN did. I have had a post on the fedora.forum for some time about the ability to utilize discrete block devices like hard drives as guest images and no one has been able to reply. There is a lot of "hype" about the better "speed" from para-virtualization instead of full virtualization. The published benchmark tests that I have been able to find indicate that para-virtualization tends to be better able to "prioritize" cpu utilization between the host and guest "systems", so that only some "systems" degrade which makes some appear to be faster, while full virtualization tends force equal utilization so that all of the "systems" tend to degrade equally based on the number of host/guest "systems" are currently running.

Please take this note as a favorable user who is concerned about the direction that Fedora appears to be going. There needs to be increased diversity of functionality, adding new functionality and improvements while maintaining the legacy functionality and capabilities. Pushing only the new at the expense of the old is a Microsoft mantra. It should not be a Linux one.

Thank you for you time and patience in reading this long note, Roy Bynum rabynum@ieee.org 214-774-2923

On Mon, 2009-02-16 at 10:25 +0100, Christoph Wickert wrote:

Am Freitag, den 06.02.2009, 14:01 -0500 schrieb Matthias Clasen:

...

Hey,

I have just build a redhat-menus package that gets rid of the Submenus in Preferences. We kinda inherited them from the control-center shell, which never really took off, and they didn't really work well, since the categorization left people guessing which submenu to open.

I don't thing that's a good argument, because you get used to the submenus quickly. I really liked them. We worked hard to get everything right, filed bugs against packages that were not inside of the submenus, and now we throw all this away?

+1. I've received this update yesterday and it makes the Preferences menu much less efficient to use. Please put the sub-menus back.

...

This means the Preferences menu will be a bit long. We should perhaps take it as encouragement to weed out some unnecessary things from there...

I have a pretty standard install of F10 and I have 28 menu entries for preferences. A screen with 600 px height and two panels can only take 18 menu entries, this means that we'll have to remove 10. This isn't possible, at least without ether a) removing stuff that really is needed or b) major changes in Gnome upstream.

I have 800 px height and two panels and it hardly fits there on pretty standard Rawhide install...

Martin

On Mon, 2009-02-16 at 09:15 -0500, Matthias Clasen wrote:

On Mon, 2009-02-16 at 10:25 +0100, Christoph Wickert wrote:

...

I don't thing that's a good argument, because you get used to the submenus quickly. I really liked them. We worked hard to get everything right, filed bugs against packages that were not inside of the submenus, and now we throw all this away?

Well, if you got used to submenus quickly, you will probably also get used to no submenus quickly...

Not necessarily. It's easier to navigate through shorter menus, divided logically, than in one loooong manu that hardly fits your screen, at least for me ;-) Although, I don't say the current sorting is flawless. E.g. what is the difference between Preferences->System and Administration? Gnome-control-center does not differentiate between those two :~/

On a less flippant note, somebody is already working on a package to add submenus in a separate package, like the games-menus (?) package does to the games menu.

That sounds like a good and pretty much conflict-less solution to me :-)

Martin

Am Montag, den 16.02.2009, 09:15 -0500 schrieb Matthias Clasen:

On Mon, 2009-02-16 at 10:25 +0100, Christoph Wickert wrote:

...

Am Freitag, den 06.02.2009, 14:01 -0500 schrieb Matthias Clasen:

...

Hey,

I have just build a redhat-menus package that gets rid of the Submenus in Preferences. We kinda inherited them from the control-center shell, which never really took off, and they didn't really work well, since the categorization left people guessing which submenu to open.

I don't thing that's a good argument, because you get used to the submenus quickly. I really liked them. We worked hard to get everything right, filed bugs against packages that were not inside of the submenus, and now we throw all this away?

Well, if you got used to submenus quickly, you will probably also get used to no submenus quickly...

How about the space argument then? How do you want to get rid of 10 menu entries (that's more than a third)?

On a less flippant note, somebody is already working on a package to add submenus in a separate package, like the games-menus (?) package does to the games menu.

Yes, that's Rudolf Kastl and me, and it's a sisyphean task, because most packages don't use subcategories correctly. The only desktop files that were using it were the ones in the prefs menu, but nobody will notice it any longer. :(

Regards, Christoph

On Mon, 2009-02-16 at 09:15 -0500, Matthias Clasen wrote:

On a less flippant note, somebody is already working on a package to add submenus in a separate package, like the games-menus (?) package does to the games menu.

Turns out I was wrong and had to do this myself... Anybody who wants an easy way to get the Preferences submenus back is welcome to do the package review:

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=487263

Matthias