tuxtoday

Which menu-applet is the best?

I cannot possibly give an answer to this that will apply to everyones taste, but what I can do is give an overall review of the three contestants and tell you what I feel is the good, and bad, things about them.

Our first contestant is..

Gimmie

Gimmie is the name of a pretty new contender in the Gnome-menu contest. It consists of four dropdown-menus:

Linux is the menu for bookmarked folders, devices and media, printers, and computers in your network. This is also where you find “Settings” which contains everything that would normally be in the “System”-menu in the original Gnome menu-bar, like Synaptic.

Programs is where you.. find your programs. It’s easily navigated with tabs on the left for browsing different categories.

Under Library  you find your recently used files, your tomboy-notes, your music and movies, and your Firefox-downloads.

The last dropdown-menu is People. This is, according to me, the coolest feature of Gimmie. Here you can view your instant-messaging contacts, and also GMail and Friendster (even though those two weren’t tested, I just assume they work, or will work, seeing how the icons are there

SLAB

The SLAB-style menu originates from Novell’s SUSE/OpenSUSE distributions but are available on many others. It consists of one window with three tabs on the top:

Applications which displays popular applications, and if you wish to browse all of the applications, you can click the “More Applications” button and it will display a separate window for the rest.

 Documents  displays the recently used documents and pictures, and when clicking “More Documents” button nautilus is opened in the Documents-folder in your home-directory. I’m not sure what happens if you haven’t got such a directory though.

Places displays a the Nautilus-bookmarks and brings you to your homefolder in when clicking “More Places”. As simple as that.

Other than these three tabs there is also the right panel on the SLAB-menu that has icons for  “Help”, “Lock Screen”, “Control Center” (The Gnome Control-center), “Logout”, and also “Harddrive” and “Network Manager”.

Gnome Menu Bar

Of course, the original Menu Bar is also in this post. Most of you are probably familiar with this menu-applet, if you’re not running a distro that uses some other applet of course.

Basically it’s the three dropdown-menus Applications, Places, and System.
The Applications menu is divided into submenus for different categories, such as Internet, Accesories, and Programming.

The Places menu consists of shortcuts for your home-folder, home-desktop, bookmarks, network. It also has a submenu for recently used documents and a “Connect to server”-option.

Oh, and a “Search” option of course.

The third and last dropdown-menu is the System menu, which consists of “About Gnome”, “About Ubuntu”, the helpbrowser, and an option for shutdown/logout, other that, of course, the two submenus.

The submenus are Preferences and Administration, where Preferences is full of options like “Apperance”, “About Me”, “Keyboard”, etc. Administration is where you find your system administration tools, such as  Synaptic, Network tools and more.

Personally, I use Gimmie, because I find it to be fast and responsive, at the same time as it offers all the funtionality I could wish for, and a little beyond that. I especially like the fact  that I can access my Pidgin-contact directly from the menu.

Slab is a nice looking menu-applet, but I just find it to be a bit annoying that I have to bring up a whole new windows just to access all of my applications.

The original Gnome menu bar is fully functional but sometimes the lack of structure is a bit annoying. This is especially true in the Administration/Preferences menus.

So I’ll go with Gimmie, even though it currently is beta software. I won’t tell you what to choose, make up your own mind.

Note to readers: All of the above was tested on Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon.