Well, Andreas and I have been chatting offline and I'll post what I told
him:

"In all reality the fact that there are different toolkits that all
operate differently and we are the only one to support the Mac-style
menus is a good and valid argument against making it the default. That's
why I said I wasn't going to push the subject. But it *is* faster
because there is no targeting issues and it's on a screen edge - you
just flick the mouse, and there is no usability issue with it (I have
*never* heard anyone complaining about how hard their Mac is to use vs.
a Windows box ;-) Nonetheless making it the default for all X11 apps to
act somewhat identically is more important than a better default menu
mechanism at this point IMHO. As far as people arguing that the
universal menubar is not as easy to use, that's just bunk and has no
basis in what users of both Mac and Windows systems say (except here -
which seems to be a huge exception ;-)

What I would really like myself and others have already discussed, a way
for people to choose an interface style that sets all the configuration
settings to some default for the UI style. So you would just have
radiobuttons for something like "Platinum", "Next", "System", "Default",
"CDE", "Windows", etc... and it would change widget styles, icon modes,
kicker, KWin, etc... Then we can run it when KDE first runs. This goes
back to my saying we need more of a theme manager type interface as the
default UI for configuration. People can do more extensive configuration
later."

This being said, hopefully after KDE2 is done you won't have to use NS
anymore and we can all start working on KImageShop so you wont have to
use Gimp. Then we can all live in KDE utopia with our Mac menubar for
everything one would want ;-)


Carsten Pfeiffer wrote:
> 
> On Thu, Apr 27, 2000 at 11:35:58PM +0100, Rik Hemsley wrote:
> 
> Hiya,
> 
> > * The apps that aren't based on the KDE libraries that are in widespread
> >   use (used by the most people) include Netscape Navigator and The Gimp.
> >   Konqueror makes NN obsolete. The Gimp doesn't put the menubar at the
> >   top of a window.
> 
> Add Xemacs, xfig, lyx and any wine-app. Hmm, concerning the lyx, does
> it work with KDE1 and KDE2 applications? I.e. would klyx (kde1) put the
> menubar on top as well?
> 
> I tried it out for a while, but it's _really_ ennerving that some apps
> (e.g. netscape) always cover the menubar when started. It's not fun to
> always move new netscapes windows away so that they don't cover the
> menubar.
> 
> Cheers,
> Carsten Pfeiffer
> --
> http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/1632/

-- 
Daniel M. Duley - Unix developer & sys admin.
http://www.mosfet.org - The place for KDE development news.
mosfet@mandrakesoft.com
mosfet@kde.org