Menu issues

[Drew Leske]

Hi all,

I've been using XFCE for years and I've loved it.  It's a great little
desktop environment that has traditionally been low-resource, fast, and
flexible.  I'm sort of disturbed by the things I've been reading lately
in trying to figure out why a recent upgrade killed my custom menus.
Specifically, the comment: 

  "I think people just need to understand that some features aren't
  going to work well on lower-end hardware, and if it bothers you,
  you just have to suck it up and disable it if possible."

This was from a thread involving a complaint about slowness in popping
up menus:
http://foo-projects.org/pipermail/xfce/2009-May/025277.html

I don't tend to use slower machines for graphical stuff (older machines
are for hobby server farms) but I definitely go for low-resource
software.  Regardless of how fast your machine is, it will run more
slowly than necessary if it's running unnecessary software all the time.
And that's why I always appreciated XFCE--low drag, high speed.  

XFCE is supposed to be "lightweight".  Is that still a goal?  Other
people have commented that "XFCE is approaching Gnome!  Woo!" and my
response to that is, "Why aren't you using Gnome?"  I don't use Gnome
because while it's pretty and very useful for many people, it's got a
lot of stuff I don't need.

The effort involved in creating custom menus at this point is pretty
harrowing.  I haven't gotten time to try it out, because from the look
of things I'll have to spend quite a bit of time scripting it up.  Up
till recently I've had a couple of very simple scripts to create menus
giving me easy access to all the systems I'm responsible for, and XFCE
has made it very easy and simple to plug in to my task management
system, including the custom menus used to organize the tasks.  This is
no longer nearly as simple.

So I guess this is a bit of a ramble, but my questions are:

(1) Is being a lightweight desktop environment still a goal?

(2) For those using custom menus, have you found a reasonable solution?

I have considered going back to 4.4.3, but this doesn't seem like the
correct solution, and would cut me out of bug fixes and the like.
Having said that, I never had any problems with 4.4.3.

And for any developers listening, please understand I think XFCE is
great and I do appreciate all the work that's gone into it.

Cheers,
Drew.


Drew Leske, Senior Systems Administrator    | dleske at uvic.ca
Unix Services Team, University Systems      | 250-472-5055 (office)
University of Victoria                      | 250-588-4311 (cel)