Customizing the GNOME Main Menu

A lot of the comments on digg.com have been missing the mark on what SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10's Main Menu is all about. Accusations of filching the concept from Vista, and oversimplifying the interface have had some solid defense in the threads, so I won't bother to address them here.

But one line of question that is interesting to me has to do with customizing the interface. One comment stated something to the effect that the interface seems to assume what applications a user will need.

Indeed, defaults have to be in place for Favorite Applications. And as it stands now, the menu is not a learning interface. That is, icons don't just add themselves because you use them a lot. ("Recently Used Applications" sort of does this, but it just shows what you most recently used as opposed to most frequently use.)

The "Favorite Applications" is easy to customize. From the "More Applications" button, you get the Application Browser window, shown here. It has a cool filter function on it, so you can see that I have typed "ga" to filter down to the items that have "ga" in them. Gaim and several games come up. (I could have also typed "Instant" to see Gaim.)

From there, a right-click brings up the menu you see here. That's how easy it is to add an item to the menu.

When you want to remove items, you do it right from the menu. Easy as that.

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Possibly related posts: (automatically generated)

• Unexpected Interest in Main Menu
• How to Revert to Standard Gnome Menus
• Favorite IM Applications
• Kickoff Start Menu