Hi guys,
I know that kickoff is the default menu of Plasma since its early versions and has become a distinctive characteristic of the desktop. But, in the last days, I tried the classic application menu (i think is the one call Kicker, according to official plasma 5 release announcement) and I find it superior than Kickoff in terms of usability for the following reason:

- Mouse navigation. Kicker requires less click than Kickoff to find an application; well, this is not true if you really know in which subcategory the application is located, but if you don’t know the place classic menu requires 2 click against 1+x click of Kickoff (1 to open the menu, 1 to select a subcategory, 1 to go back to the application view, 1 to select another sub category…and so on). Well, if you know the name of application you can use the search function, but it is provided also by classic menu.

- Keyboard navigation. I hate to say it, but Kickoff keyboard navigation is quite a mess, in my opinion: 1 keyboard shortcut to open the menu, then right/ left arrow to select the submenu (favorite/applications/computer/recently used/leave), then up and down to select the applications subcategory (per example), then right arrow to open it, left if the subcategory is wrong, again up/down, left/right…and finally enter to open the application. On the other hand, application menu requires less key presses: 1 combination to open the menu, then up/down to select the subcategory, right to go into the right subcategory (because you have an instant preview of it),then enter to open application.

- Everything is visible under a quick view: you open the menu and have the buttons to shutdown/restart/logout on the left bottom, just above the favorite application shortcut and, on the right, all the subcategory of applications. Kickoff, instead need a little bit of mouse navigation to show all the things that can do.

- It is an old fashioned cascade menu: well, this could be a little bit disappointing to someone, because it is obiouvsly less original than Kickoff. Anyway this could be considered as a pro: for a new plasma user, coming per example from windows or gnome 2 or lxde or kde3, application menu might seem more familiar rather than kickoff. The learning curve of plasma would be shorter (maybe just a little bit, but shorter!) and the new user will feel suddenly at home.


This little wall of text(sorry guys!) to ask you: what about make Kicker the default launcher for Plasma 5?

Personally, I agree. I really like Homerun Kicker.
In the end, though, each distribution can decide what they use as the default, and users can switch if they prefer the other. We should make sure both variants are well maintained and then we can leave the choice to others.
Kickoff allows easier transition for people who already used it in Plasma 4. For distros that target mainly people who are new to Plasma, using Homerun Kicker as default would make sense.

Errr... i think he's talking about the Win95 style startmenu. Not Homerun. (At least homerun wasn't like that last time I used it)

luebking wrote:Errr... i think he's talking about the Win95 style startmenu. Not Homerun. (At least homerun wasn't like that last time I used it)

No no, he certainly means the new Kicker, with search functionality and everything. It was originally called Homerun Kicker but seems to be called just "Kicker" now.

@luebking i'm talking about this one
http://oi61.tinypic.com/2wp2v6u.jpg
It's included in the default set of plasmoids of plasma 5 (at least in the Project Neon iso)

duiliob wrote:@luebking i'm talking about this one
http://oi61.tinypic.com/2wp2v6u.jpg

Yeah, that's (Homerun) Kicker. Not the old "Classic Menu".

colomar wrote:We should make sure both variants are well maintained and then we can leave the choice to others.

Absolutely, I agree. It would be great if was provided also a fullscreen menu, like homerun/launchpad (osx).

colomar wrote:In the end, though, each distribution can decide what they use as the default, and users can switch if they prefer the other.

Well this is in my opinion a little problem, because a lot of distributions provide a vanilla KDE, if you exclude the wallpaper (I'm thinking about Fedora and Debian, per example). For this reason a fundamental point, in my opinion, is find the best default for a general user.


ps: Jazz Jackrabbit ROCKS!

I also think that Kicker is a much superior offer to Kickoff and would love to see it as the default option in the Plasma desktop.

I've been using Lancelot since forever so i don't care
Never been a fan of either Kickoff or the classic menu

EraX wrote:I've been using Lancelot since forever so i don't care
Never been a fan of either Kickoff or the classic menu

Lancelot is quite nice, too, but I think it's too complex to be the default. It's geared more towards advanced users.

colomar wrote:Lancelot is quite nice, too, but I think it's too complex to be the default. It's geared more towards advanced users.

It's not that complex, but it offers a lot better navigation between categories/sections than any of the two discussed here - a lot better than kickoff and a little bit better than the classic menu.

EraX wrote:I've been using Lancelot since forever so i don't care
Never been a fan of either Kickoff or the classic menu

Well, I do not use even a menu, but just Icon Only task bar and Krunner. However this is not the heart of the matter: finding a good default is very important in my opinion,
because maybe we are some skilled user who are able/want spend some time for change the settings of Plasma, but not everybody is able/want/has time to change them!
Surfing the web, through forum, blog, ecc, I've seen a lot of people complaining about the default setting of plasma, so they move to another DE: we must avoid it, absolutely!

I much prefer Kicker. Kickoff has always felt a bit "off" to me. The menu items are huge and everything takes extra clicks. Kicker feels right at home to me: a KDE3 menu but with the essential elements of search and quick launch. Perhaps you could do what KDE3 did and ask the user what they want on first use?

spamyak wrote:Perhaps you could do what KDE3 did and ask the user what they want on first use?

The last time we proposed a "first use wizard", we got quite some flak from people saying that users don't want to have to make decisions even before they could try things out.
However, with the next release, it will be much easier for users to switch between alternative Plasmoids for the same purpose. See this thread for further details:https://forum.kde.org/viewtopic.php?f=285&t=122067 With that in place, users can easily switch to their preferred launcher.

In that case, I still prefer the idea of Kicker being default, or having some very obvious way to switch such as a notification the first time you use the menu ("Click to switch launchers"). Kickoff looks nice but its usability for anyone but the most inexperienced user is subpar.