7 ms·

KDE and the Menu Crisis

53 points by severine 9y ago

mixedCase 9y ago
I don't see the authors point. Use the menu for discoverability if you even need that, any of the options work. For launching just partially type the application's name and press enter. Don't even need a menu, just use KRunner (Alt+F2, there are equivalents in all desktops). My SO isn't confused by menus despite having little to no experience with desktop computers, and neither am I, but I don't even have a full blown "menu" because I don't need one; I just have dmenu installed.
- mjevans 9y ago
  I mostly agree, but think the main issue is /discoverability/. I had no idea I could get back to a traditional menu mode (in KDE Plasma) if I wanted (I'm unsure if I do). The menu doesn't educate me what the 'short command' for a program is, so it can't teach me how to find it or launch it directly by typing in that shorter name (but searching for the literal executable name does work if you happened to know it). The tasks and other features are things I haven't noticed. Maybe a built in 'demo / training' application could show me the intended workflow, and then ask me to replicate it within a test 'desktop window'?
  - SubiculumCode 9y ago
    I agree that it would be nice to see what the command line entry would be for an application.
    - digi_owl 9y ago
      That would not be a problem except that the DEs seems to want to wrap their specific named binaries in generic sounding .desktop files...
- superobserver 9y ago
  Right. Quick accessibility with a keyboard shortcut and partial name typing is the way to go. The trick is ensuring you have the right name (so a slight learning curve).
  - ams6110 9y ago
    In fact my desktop has no menus at all. I start everything from a terminal (I launch terminals with a keyboard shortcut).
- eat_veggies 9y ago
  Can you make dmenu sort by most used? I want to switch over due to it's awesome minimalism but that's a feature from rofi I can't go without, mostly because to open my browser I can just go mod-d enter
  - mixedCase 9y ago
    I'd say stick with Rofi. I had considered moving to it but dmenu2 just works well enough for what I want it to do to bother switching. If I was certain I wanted more features, I'd go with Rofi.
  - fiddlerwoaroof 9y ago
    yeganesh (http://dmwit.com/yeganesh/ http://dmwit.com/yeganesh/) is a tool that works with dmenu to produce the "most used" functionality. It works really well for what I need.
  - jmontano 9y ago
    Dmenu's patched versions can sort by use. Manjaro-i3 uses dmenu_recency
- slowmovintarget 9y ago
  This entry just seemed like an elaborate, well-written, well-documented complaint. I've been reading so many articles lately that say "Stuff's on fire, yo." But they don't go into why, they don't mention alternative solutions, or who is trying to do something about it. They are the journalistic equivalent of a tweet saying "Hey, my nose itches." Don't keep me in suspense, did you develop a new means of itching said nose? Have you interviewed other itchees to find out if there's a new trend? There's an entire half of this article missing where discussion of alternative methods of computer interaction are offered up. Voice launch, context-sensitive palettes, random launch lottery with an I'm Feeling Lucky button... But it's not there, just an "I hate menus" kvetch. Sigh. Tell me a story, while you're complaining, and make sure you have an ending. Otherwise it's just a far-too-long bumper sticker.
oelmekki 9y ago
Plasma is probably not the best example to illustrate this problem : should everybody be happy with menus, you would probably still have 3 alternatives in Plasma, because it's all about offering highly configurable experience. Personally, it's extremely rare that I use the menu. I do everything through Krunner, which is way more integrated and useful that it may look at first glance. You can look for application by their name, of course, but also for application by their description, for file by their name, for windows by their running program or window title, etc. One cool underrated feature : you can try to launch applications you haven't installed yet, and it brings up package manager to install it (on KDE Neon, at least, not sure for other distros).
nol13 9y ago
my win95 clone menu works just fine, thanks. go reinvent something else.
- majewsky 9y ago
  This is being down-voted, but it's a relevant point. The cascading-menu style of application launchers is from the 90s, yet is still very common for lack of a better method of offering access to a potentially very large number of applications. If you think about it, even the homescreen of Android or iOS is basically the same, although of course optimized for a touch interface. You have a long list of apps, and you can group them into folders that open when you tap on them, same as how a cascading menu opens when you hover its entry. The only difference to the launchers included in Plasma is that folders on Android/iOS are created and managed entirely by the user, whereas Plasma insists on using the application metadata to group stuff together. Is there any other way? The only thing I can think of right now is search (either via text or voice; all launchers in Plasma have text search over name and description, so they're good there) and whatever the commandline does... Stack Overflow, I guess? :)
  - nol13 9y ago
    ya, having to jump back and forth between the current 'usable' DE over the years had made me somewhat salty on this point.
  - pbhjpbhj 9y ago
    >all launchers in Plasma have text search over name and description, so they're good there // I find this a bit lacking, for example there's a lot more apps listed under "audio" than "sound" yet for menu purposes, particularly discoverability, they should be treated as synonyms; one can't be expected to remember the precise adjective/noun used in an app description. The thing I'd most like for the plasma menu is just to be able to alter it's size, corner drag hasn't existed in KDE menu for a long time now. I do a config file fix, which gets overwritten every update.
    - toyg 9y ago
bitbang 9y ago
/molehill/mountain/g
lima 9y ago
I've been using the Kupfer application launcher for years. Haven't touched the KDE menu since :-)
- abrowne 9y ago
  Same here, but Albert on Ubuntu MATE.
aembleton 9y ago
I use Kupfer -http://lifehacker.com/5344158/kupfer-launches-linux-files-and-applications-quickly http://lifehacker.com/5344158/kupfer-launches-linux-files-an... Just ctrl+space and start typing in the name of the application you want to launch. Works great. I very rarely use a menu.
sandworm101 9y ago
I require menus. I dont want dozens of icons and i certainly dont want to employ a keyboard. I dont care that the full menu is ten layers deep. Ill move the dozen programs i use every day into a top layer. i dont judge a ui on simplicity or artistic merit. Let me launch my software via my mouse and then get out of the way. Everything beyond that is overthinking.
ChuckMcM 9y ago
I think this is a good start at looking at some of the human factors issues with menus but it doesn't even seem to get out of the "known issues" on to something more. Menus have been an issue for a long time, ever since XDE[1] at least. The original Mac "global menu bar across the top" was one shot at it, Xerox (and XFCE it seems) had the menu popup when ever you hit the right button. Windows of course had the 'start' button which did a 'menu reveal'. But there are other interesting ideas in menus as well. One of my favorites in terms of ingenuity were the pie menus[2]. I saw a demo which I believe was Don Hopkins work and it demonstrated how quickly and accurately you could select things. That speed and accuracy derived from converting menu disambiguation using a bunch of possibly overlapping rectangles, to using only vectors from the current point. One of the challenges that has added to the problem has been ginormous screens. When menu metaphors are attached to the physical screen boundaries the amount of mouse movement needed is quite large. Of course with touch screens it is compensated for by just moving your finger, but as we've seen on iPads and Surface Pros that can limit menu density due to fat fingers :-) [1] The Xerox Development Environment - https://web.archive.org/web/20041204132344/http://www.apearson.f2s.com/xde.html https://web.archive.org/web/20041204132344/http://www.apears... (no doubt kens can fire it up on the Alto :-) [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pie_menu#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pie_menu#History
- aidenn0 9y ago
  Pie menus are great for selecting from a small number of options quickly; I'm not sure that they are any better when chained than rectangular menus though.
- pram 9y ago
  I used a radial menu extension in the early versions of Firefox that I thought was fantastic. I assume they don't have more widespread use because it typically depends on symbol memorization, and people are already used to long lists of things?
  - digi_owl 9y ago
    I suspect i tested the same one, and best i recall it didn't mix well with other extensions that added stuff to the right click menu. Best i can tell, radial works as long as you have a small, fixed set of action that you want to do repeatedly. But once you have a situation where the user can add arbitrary new actions it breaks down because it relies on the actions being sorted and fixed in location. The result, as best i recall, in the Firefox extension case, was that extension added menu entries would dangle of in some "misc" entry at the bottom right of the radial. Effectively turning it into a traditional menu dangling off a radial one...
bloaf 9y ago
Question: How do you present the user with a list of all the applications on the computer? Answer: With a list (of icons + text) or list (of icon tiles) or a couple of lists (same as the others, split by categories.) You can slice and dice things however you like, but you are fundamentally presenting a list of things, and I don't think we can fundamentally improve on the process of presenting a list of things above and beyond literally showing lists of things. Search-ability is great, but it is only good for people who know the names of the programs that do what they want. Icons+text are compact, but don't give any indication of program functionality and don't scale well. Categorized lists give both names and indication of program function, but require more user button-pushing to find the program they want. I think the only real improvement possible in this field is an application search function that lets user search for what they want to do, rather than for specific applications. If the author wants to find a more realistic opportunity for improvement in the "show all applications" direction, he should look at the "help" command output, as compared to compgen -c.
mmphosis 9y ago
Too many menus. Too many applications. Applications: Web Browser Email Text Editor Terminal User: Switch User Log out Restart Shutdown
- aidenn0 9y ago
  Plasma's default setup starts with the favorites tab, which for me was prepopulated with web browser, e-mail, and file manager (no text editor nor terminal, which is sane for non-programmers). Pressing left goes to the "leave" tab which hass all of the options you suggest, plus suspend and hibernate. Pressing right goes to the "all applications' tab which is ordered as a hierarchy.
tomxor 9y ago
If you hate this stuff try dmenu... although it's not really target at DE people.
jcrben 9y ago
> However, as hard drives became larger, users had to scan more and more applications to find the one they wanted. Not really. I only use a handful of desktop apps due to the rise of self-hosted and browser apps.
saagarjha 9y ago
On macOS everyone I know uses some sort of search, be it Spotlight or Alfred or QuickSilver, to open apps. This generally works well–I can open most apps in under a second.
StillBored 9y ago
The first comment in the article hits the nail on the head. The start menu's are broken because everyone is trying to fix a non-problem with the old win95 style hierarchical menu and creating things with worse problems. Particularly, once the half dozen programs the user clicks frequently are pinned in a quick launch area or at the top level of the menu. For touch screen users, just bump the clickable area size for each menu and it would present a better solution than iOS, Android or win10 currently provide.

53 points by severine 9y ago

I don't see the authors point. Use the menu for discoverability if you even need that, any of the options work. For launching just partially type the application's name and press enter. Don't even need a menu, just use KRunner (Alt+F2, there are equivalents in all desktops). My SO isn't confused by menus despite having little to no experience with desktop computers, and neither am I, but I don't even have a full blown "menu" because I don't need one; I just have dmenu installed.

mjevans 9y ago
I mostly agree, but think the main issue is /discoverability/. I had no idea I could get back to a traditional menu mode (in KDE Plasma) if I wanted (I'm unsure if I do). The menu doesn't educate me what the 'short command' for a program is, so it can't teach me how to find it or launch it directly by typing in that shorter name (but searching for the literal executable name does work if you happened to know it). The tasks and other features are things I haven't noticed. Maybe a built in 'demo / training' application could show me the intended workflow, and then ask me to replicate it within a test 'desktop window'?
- SubiculumCode 9y ago
  I agree that it would be nice to see what the command line entry would be for an application.
  - digi_owl 9y ago
    That would not be a problem except that the DEs seems to want to wrap their specific named binaries in generic sounding .desktop files...
superobserver 9y ago
Right. Quick accessibility with a keyboard shortcut and partial name typing is the way to go. The trick is ensuring you have the right name (so a slight learning curve).
- ams6110 9y ago
  In fact my desktop has no menus at all. I start everything from a terminal (I launch terminals with a keyboard shortcut).
eat_veggies 9y ago
Can you make dmenu sort by most used? I want to switch over due to it's awesome minimalism but that's a feature from rofi I can't go without, mostly because to open my browser I can just go mod-d enter
- mixedCase 9y ago
  I'd say stick with Rofi. I had considered moving to it but dmenu2 just works well enough for what I want it to do to bother switching. If I was certain I wanted more features, I'd go with Rofi.
- fiddlerwoaroof 9y ago
  yeganesh (http://dmwit.com/yeganesh/ http://dmwit.com/yeganesh/) is a tool that works with dmenu to produce the "most used" functionality. It works really well for what I need.
- jmontano 9y ago
  Dmenu's patched versions can sort by use. Manjaro-i3 uses dmenu_recency
slowmovintarget 9y ago
This entry just seemed like an elaborate, well-written, well-documented complaint. I've been reading so many articles lately that say "Stuff's on fire, yo." But they don't go into why, they don't mention alternative solutions, or who is trying to do something about it. They are the journalistic equivalent of a tweet saying "Hey, my nose itches." Don't keep me in suspense, did you develop a new means of itching said nose? Have you interviewed other itchees to find out if there's a new trend? There's an entire half of this article missing where discussion of alternative methods of computer interaction are offered up. Voice launch, context-sensitive palettes, random launch lottery with an I'm Feeling Lucky button... But it's not there, just an "I hate menus" kvetch. Sigh. Tell me a story, while you're complaining, and make sure you have an ending. Otherwise it's just a far-too-long bumper sticker.

oelmekki 9y ago

Plasma is probably not the best example to illustrate this problem : should everybody be happy with menus, you would probably still have 3 alternatives in Plasma, because it's all about offering highly configurable experience. Personally, it's extremely rare that I use the menu. I do everything through Krunner, which is way more integrated and useful that it may look at first glance. You can look for application by their name, of course, but also for application by their description, for file by their name, for windows by their running program or window title, etc. One cool underrated feature : you can try to launch applications you haven't installed yet, and it brings up package manager to install it (on KDE Neon, at least, not sure for other distros).

nol13 9y ago

my win95 clone menu works just fine, thanks. go reinvent something else.

majewsky 9y ago
This is being down-voted, but it's a relevant point. The cascading-menu style of application launchers is from the 90s, yet is still very common for lack of a better method of offering access to a potentially very large number of applications. If you think about it, even the homescreen of Android or iOS is basically the same, although of course optimized for a touch interface. You have a long list of apps, and you can group them into folders that open when you tap on them, same as how a cascading menu opens when you hover its entry. The only difference to the launchers included in Plasma is that folders on Android/iOS are created and managed entirely by the user, whereas Plasma insists on using the application metadata to group stuff together. Is there any other way? The only thing I can think of right now is search (either via text or voice; all launchers in Plasma have text search over name and description, so they're good there) and whatever the commandline does... Stack Overflow, I guess? :)
- nol13 9y ago
  ya, having to jump back and forth between the current 'usable' DE over the years had made me somewhat salty on this point.
- pbhjpbhj 9y ago
  >all launchers in Plasma have text search over name and description, so they're good there // I find this a bit lacking, for example there's a lot more apps listed under "audio" than "sound" yet for menu purposes, particularly discoverability, they should be treated as synonyms; one can't be expected to remember the precise adjective/noun used in an app description. The thing I'd most like for the plasma menu is just to be able to alter it's size, corner drag hasn't existed in KDE menu for a long time now. I do a config file fix, which gets overwritten every update.
  - toyg 9y ago

bitbang 9y ago

/molehill/mountain/g

lima 9y ago

I've been using the Kupfer application launcher for years. Haven't touched the KDE menu since :-)

abrowne 9y ago
Same here, but Albert on Ubuntu MATE.

aembleton 9y ago

I use Kupfer -http://lifehacker.com/5344158/kupfer-launches-linux-files-and-applications-quickly http://lifehacker.com/5344158/kupfer-launches-linux-files-an... Just ctrl+space and start typing in the name of the application you want to launch. Works great. I very rarely use a menu.

sandworm101 9y ago

I require menus. I dont want dozens of icons and i certainly dont want to employ a keyboard. I dont care that the full menu is ten layers deep. Ill move the dozen programs i use every day into a top layer. i dont judge a ui on simplicity or artistic merit. Let me launch my software via my mouse and then get out of the way. Everything beyond that is overthinking.

ChuckMcM 9y ago

I think this is a good start at looking at some of the human factors issues with menus but it doesn't even seem to get out of the "known issues" on to something more. Menus have been an issue for a long time, ever since XDE[1] at least. The original Mac "global menu bar across the top" was one shot at it, Xerox (and XFCE it seems) had the menu popup when ever you hit the right button. Windows of course had the 'start' button which did a 'menu reveal'. But there are other interesting ideas in menus as well. One of my favorites in terms of ingenuity were the pie menus[2]. I saw a demo which I believe was Don Hopkins work and it demonstrated how quickly and accurately you could select things. That speed and accuracy derived from converting menu disambiguation using a bunch of possibly overlapping rectangles, to using only vectors from the current point. One of the challenges that has added to the problem has been ginormous screens. When menu metaphors are attached to the physical screen boundaries the amount of mouse movement needed is quite large. Of course with touch screens it is compensated for by just moving your finger, but as we've seen on iPads and Surface Pros that can limit menu density due to fat fingers :-) [1] The Xerox Development Environment - https://web.archive.org/web/20041204132344/http://www.apearson.f2s.com/xde.html https://web.archive.org/web/20041204132344/http://www.apears... (no doubt kens can fire it up on the Alto :-) [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pie_menu#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pie_menu#History

aidenn0 9y ago
Pie menus are great for selecting from a small number of options quickly; I'm not sure that they are any better when chained than rectangular menus though.
pram 9y ago
I used a radial menu extension in the early versions of Firefox that I thought was fantastic. I assume they don't have more widespread use because it typically depends on symbol memorization, and people are already used to long lists of things?
- digi_owl 9y ago
  I suspect i tested the same one, and best i recall it didn't mix well with other extensions that added stuff to the right click menu. Best i can tell, radial works as long as you have a small, fixed set of action that you want to do repeatedly. But once you have a situation where the user can add arbitrary new actions it breaks down because it relies on the actions being sorted and fixed in location. The result, as best i recall, in the Firefox extension case, was that extension added menu entries would dangle of in some "misc" entry at the bottom right of the radial. Effectively turning it into a traditional menu dangling off a radial one...

bloaf 9y ago

Question: How do you present the user with a list of all the applications on the computer? Answer: With a list (of icons + text) or list (of icon tiles) or a couple of lists (same as the others, split by categories.) You can slice and dice things however you like, but you are fundamentally presenting a list of things, and I don't think we can fundamentally improve on the process of presenting a list of things above and beyond literally showing lists of things. Search-ability is great, but it is only good for people who know the names of the programs that do what they want. Icons+text are compact, but don't give any indication of program functionality and don't scale well. Categorized lists give both names and indication of program function, but require more user button-pushing to find the program they want. I think the only real improvement possible in this field is an application search function that lets user search for what they want to do, rather than for specific applications. If the author wants to find a more realistic opportunity for improvement in the "show all applications" direction, he should look at the "help" command output, as compared to compgen -c.

mmphosis 9y ago

Too many menus. Too many applications. Applications: Web Browser Email Text Editor Terminal User: Switch User Log out Restart Shutdown

aidenn0 9y ago
Plasma's default setup starts with the favorites tab, which for me was prepopulated with web browser, e-mail, and file manager (no text editor nor terminal, which is sane for non-programmers). Pressing left goes to the "leave" tab which hass all of the options you suggest, plus suspend and hibernate. Pressing right goes to the "all applications' tab which is ordered as a hierarchy.

tomxor 9y ago

If you hate this stuff try dmenu... although it's not really target at DE people.

jcrben 9y ago

> However, as hard drives became larger, users had to scan more and more applications to find the one they wanted. Not really. I only use a handful of desktop apps due to the rise of self-hosted and browser apps.

saagarjha 9y ago

On macOS everyone I know uses some sort of search, be it Spotlight or Alfred or QuickSilver, to open apps. This generally works well–I can open most apps in under a second.

StillBored 9y ago

The first comment in the article hits the nail on the head. The start menu's are broken because everyone is trying to fix a non-problem with the old win95 style hierarchical menu and creating things with worse problems. Particularly, once the half dozen programs the user clicks frequently are pinned in a quick launch area or at the top level of the menu. For touch screen users, just bump the clickable area size for each menu and it would present a better solution than iOS, Android or win10 currently provide.