There’s a new lxqt-plugin-wingmenu package in Plucky that folks can play with if they want, but Fancy Menu (that is included with lxqt-panel) is more or less the same thing. Here’s it in action with some very rough theming done to it (I’d want to improve this more):
There was a bit of discussion on our Matrix development room about whether or not to make it a new default. It does take up more space (until you click on a category in the default menu, but even then it does take up a wee bit more), but it offers more functionality. In particular, I really like the favorites.
As a simple user I can’t recognize enough advantages in order to put precious working force into changing the application menu. My few favorites are in the quicklaunch part of the panel or on the desktop. But I’m very eager to learn about other opinions in the following discussion.
Personally I don’t really like the fancy menu much. Just from a UX standpoint, the Lubuntu, settings, and power icons/buttons are HUGE and just look bad. Also “All Applicati…” is annoying. The menu is fancier than the existing one, but is that really a plus? Personally I’ve always just searched for apps I want using the search bar. I like the “classic” feel of the current application menu and would prefer to keep it.
If you’d like to play with Fancy Menu, you can. It’s been in lxqt-panel since Oracular. Just add a new widget and you’ll find it. If you need more explicit instructions I can provide them. Do note that out of the box, it has no theming and will come as a real shock, visually.
Actually, what we packaged was lxqt-plugin-wingmenu. Upon inspection, like I said above, I don’t see it as any different than Fancy Menu and I see no real reason to add that. If you really want to, you can install the package and then you can add it as a widget just like I mentioned above.
The only effort we would need to provide is two fold:
Change the default in lubuntu-default-settings. Easy.
Update the theme in lubuntu-artwork to support Fancy Menu. Pretty easy given that it’s kind of already been done for us. We just need to adapt the work of @jfaulk1230here. In reality, we should do this anyways to give people that do want to use Fancy Menu a more enjoyable experience.
I bet you we can handle that with theming.
I don’t know that I think it’s annoying. Let’s imagine you have a ton of packages installed and there’s one particular package you can’t remember the name of so you can’t search for it easily. You don’t remember which category it’s in and you have so many packages you can’t find it even if you went through each category. Being able to scroll through that list would be helpful. I admit that’s a pretty edgy edge case, but it doesn’t hurt anyone.
In response to the “All Applicati…” thing, it’s not the existence of the menu that’s a problem, it’s the cut-off text when there’s enough room for it. If that could be fixed then it would be great.
So assuming those two things are fixed, you have any other reason not to make it default? It appears to me a better user experience, even though we may have preferences for something else. Again, I use i3 so my personal opinion isn’t particularly relevant here. It’s the users I’m thinking of.
Personal preference aside, I think most users will consider this an upgrade, so yeah, if this was fixed I could vote in favor of it. I’d still be replacing the menu with the classic one assuming I wasn’t too lazy to do so, but we’ve used it for many years now, a change that provides more functionality will probably be well-received.
I have added that to my system, and watched over the months to see if I favored it or still used the traditional menu. Both were on the same edge of the screen; just different positions.
Whilst I don’t use the menu much (I largely use the quick launch capacity which I’ve filled with my regular apps), I’m just using whichever is closest to where my mouse is, thus older or newer get used pretty much equal.
I do see why people visually prefer the slimmer appearance of what we’ve normally used, however I also like that I could easily populate the wingmenu with my favorites which is something I’ve utilized. Operation of the favorites OR just using name to search (ie. keyboard) are really equally fast, so I suspect those who don’t like keyboard will prefer wingmenu where as keyboard folks won’t care as both allow keyboard searching (though wingmenu hide more of screen).
Swapping one with another is easy; so for an end-user having one setup which isn’t their favorite will take only a fraction of a minute to swap to their preference. If it’s a newbie user, it’ll take more like 5 minutes but they’ll be learning how to adapt their panel to be exactly what works for them anyway; thus I see it as likely useful time anyway.
I’d thus summarize by 2c as
use whichever looks best of the box on a live system being tested, OR new install, as that first impression is important (what we have now is my 2c)
wingmenu requires adding favorites in my view to make it better, otherwise it’s giving nothing extra but hiding background/screen; so not the best out of the box as I see it
either default is easily swapped out if it’s not the users favorite & we’ve covered that I feel in manual with Customizing even if not explicitly, so in my view its not an important issue.
Personally I don’t dislike the fancy menu, but I’ve moved everything to the left side because it seems to be backwards. I don’t like the default setting.
Very Peculiar…could you show your settings? I’m trying to hunt down whether this is a settings issue or a theme issue, or both. I’ll compare it with @arraybolt3 's and see what’s different. If its the theme, then I have a few ideas of how to fix it.
Love this! I’m going to implement this into lubuntu-artwork shortly, so regardless of whether or not we choose to make Fancy Menu default, at least it will look good.
Maybe we should do the same thing for Wing Menu? Frankly, like I said above, I don’t see it as advantageous over Fancy Menu, but just saying.
