New Main Menu for Gnome

I know, I know, Slackware doesn’t ship Gnome anymore. That doesn’t change the fact that lots of people still use gnome on their slackware boxes. I’ve been a long-time user of Dropline Gnome, but will probably be give Freerock Gnome a shot next time I have to install slackware on a machine.

Anyway, the new Gnome main menu is the topic of this post. Reverend Ted posted some screenshots of the new Gnome main menu to his blog the other day. There was a lot of unexpected interest in the screenshots too, as seen by Reverend Ted’s blog stats graph.

Now, slackers, don’t get too excited about this new Gnome menu. You probably won’t see it for a while as it’s currently only included in Suse Linux 10. The menu looks very clean and it sounds like it’s based heavily around what a user would “expect” out of a menu:

The menu is accessed from a single button, labelled “Computer.” There is no “My Computer” on the desktop, as our testing found that newer computer users expected anything but a file system browser to come up when they clicked on the one on Windows. We also found that having a name like “Start” (as Windows does) confuses users when presented with tasks like “shut down your computer.” Nevertheless, a lot of users look to the bottom left for a single all-access button. Hence the Computer button. That’s how the origins of the Computer button have been explained to me.

Reverend Ted also has a post in which he details customization of the menu. Apparently some Digg.com users think this menu is a rip-off of the new menu in Windows Vista. Others are assuming the menu tries to choose what programs the user wants to run, hence Reverend Ted’s post about customization.

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