I’ve been playing and working with computers for almost 30 years now (damn, I’m old), and after having installed the Gnome desktop environment 20-25 times, I still have not come to understand the thinking behind the so called “menu system”.
The “drawer” in Gnome is awful.. many many years later, it still cannot handle pure text entries. So if you want to have a drawer full of terminal shells, you need to have different icons for all of them; alternatively, you can create simple text-icons and use them. But come on! This is 2006!!!
Menu editor you say? Sure.. do you mean the one you can access by right-clicking on the menu bar? The “Edit menus”-function is a joke. It allows me to enable and disable entries. Oh, in the help for Nautilus, which says “GNOME 2.8 Desktop User Guide” (I’m using Gnome 2.12 last time I checked), it says you can open an URI like: applications:/// to edit the applications menu; I have tried entering it in a number of ways, and Nautilus keeps coming back to me with “Unknown location”.
Don’t get me wrong; the idea of a simplified but powerful GUI is great; and Gnome has come a long way. But some really simple and obvious functionality is missing, big time. It’s almost always easier to follow somebody else when you do software development. You don’t need to make the same mistakes, and if you want to “impersonate”, you don’t have to design all that much; but with much fewer resources, and much simpler menu handling, XFCE is on to something.
KDE? No, I don’t think so 🙂