Sometimes i wonder why it is needed to have a a "start menu". Todays "start menus" contains a lot of stuff that is put into categories often beacuse the "start menu" is supposed to take up a certain amount of screen space on the left side (or wherever it is placed). This makes navigation hard and requires a lot of navigation techniques to be invented/developed.

What do you think of getting rid of the "start menu" and introduce a hotkey that switches the desktop for a screen containing the items that are in the "start menu" today but in full screen mode?

Of course this this requires fast switching but I don't think this is a problem on somewhat modern hardware.

I think it is time to get rid of the idea that everything must be placed in a window/pop up or something similar.

What do you think??

/Mats

You like in gnome 3's gnome shell? I quickly grew tired of it, too much movement on the scree...though I agree the menu needs rethinking

I have not tried gnome shell. I dont know much of it.
The idea came from mac os x really. When activating "time machine" the time machine takes over the whole screen, thats when I thougth what if the "start menu" entries was presented full screen with a nice instant fade in/fade out.

I dont know if this is a good idea or not, but it is probably worth thinking about.

/Mats

After looking at some Youtube videos showing GNOME SHELL i can say, that was not really what i was aiming for. The "menu" part is too small and is more a "virtual screen manager".

/Mats L.

When you consider the redundancy of launchers available, I don't know how necessary such a new launcher would be. You have the main menu which presents applications (and other locations and options) in a categorical fashion, you have various launcher applications/widgets/etc. which can be configured with a set of favorite/frequently-used applications, you have krunner which can be used to launch applications by name or description (or content of file or...), and you can even set up a folder view to point to the applications directory to act as another launcher.
I suppose someone could make another plasmoid which specifically displays all available applications. Set that up with a shortcut key and there you go.

malo wrote:After looking at some Youtube videos showing GNOME SHELL i can say, that was not really what i was aiming for. The "menu" part is too small and is more a "virtual screen manager".

/Mats L.

It is also the menu and it is only available through the shell, try it at first I liked it but soon I became very tired of it

I thought about the same thing when I designed my menu (Zetta). The reason I gave up on the fullscreen idea is because it requires too much mouse movement, especially on higher resolutions.

You might be interested in Plasma Netbook that has a (almost) fullscreen application launcher. It's still alpha but can see it here.

You are probably right about the mouse movement problem.
Well it was just an idea that popped up, perhaps it triggers some other kind of idea that is useful

/Mats

airdrik wrote:and you can even set up a folder view to point to the applications directory to act as another launcher.

Actually, I like to use that within dolphin. I keep a shortcut in the places panel with applications:/, just for that. Very convenient when you're already in dolphin and wants quick access to an app without having to hunt around for the start-menu. And even more so for newbies who are not (yet?) familiar with krunner.