linuxmint/Cinnamon — Issue #119: Feedback from Roger
Author: clefebvre
Created: 2012-01-08 11:25:27+00:00
State: open

Sorry, this is just a copy/paste of some feedback I got by email. I'm just putting it here for now and I'll go through it, reject some of it and create new issues from it later on ;)

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Wish-list
Recently used files
I enjoyed using them in Gnome2. This handy feature should have survived in some form.
Contextual menus
As I bought for Christmas a new laptop, I realized that today's displays are much more wide than high. This has an unfavourable influence for the display of contextual menus which are frequently much too verbose. I noticed that the last entry (Properties) is sometimes hard to find and select.

To take care of this, maybe it would be useful to define a narower line height value for contextual menus (or to let the user chose it easily).
Mint menu transparency
The user should be allowed to define easily the transparency value for the Mint menu slab as, depending on its choice of backgrounds, the display can be sometimes impaired.
Minimized applications windows in the panel
According the their number, their length varies and I find this disturbing. In the configuration menu, I would like to have the choice to replace them by the application icons only (sometimes there would be more of the same, I know). This was implemented with a very handy Gnome2 applet called Talika. The user is not confused because he launched the applications and saw the icons appear. These applications icons should be centered in the panel, not to be confused with the launcher icons on their left.
Bugs ? (or features?)
Mint Menu Applications

For coherent results, I propose that the Mint menu sticks as closely as possible to alacarte values (or that the Mint Menu takes in charge all its functionalities, which for the time being it does not).
GOOD : applications unselected by the user in alacarte do not appear in Mint menu too.
BAD : some alacarte defects are not corrected:
I noticed that both alacarte and Mint menu do not create entries for Wine installed applications. I had to create them manually.
There are many redundancies both in alacarte and Mint menu. I do not know how to safely get rid of them, out of unselecting them in alacarte.
BAD : Mint menu introduces some new defects :
the user defines in alacarte the order of the applications in each category using Up or Down arrows. This order should apply in the Mint menu too.
the user choses a language. Alacarte uses it. It should apply in the Mint menu too. It does it only for the categories, not for the applications names. Example : Visionneur d'images is seen in Mint Menu as Image viewer. Also, search in Mint Menu does not detect eog, which we can find with Synapse semantic search. Im in Mint menu admittedly provides fine results.
Background images

I triggered a problem using a background image that I later could not solve.

I used the panel Appearance to select a background image. Then, I noticed in the lower part of this panel a Theme line. Danger !!! Users should be warned to keep away from the last line of this panel (theme to use for the user interface).
Mine, confusingly had only three entries
- Adwaita
- HighContrast
- HighContrastInverse

As none was selected, I did the mistake to select Adwaita. Later I realized that the scroll bars had changed from the nice Cinnamon setting to thick blue bars. I do not know how to come back to the previous state.

I do not know in which file the theme entries for Appearance panel are kept.

What I did if it can be of any help.

On the panel appearance, the configuration file for the pictures on the left is saved in :
~/.config/gnome-control-center/background/background.xml
The pictures themselves are stored in /usr/share/backgrounds/

If I opened any other image using Image Viewer and choose to select it as a background image, this one is saved in another place,
~ /.gconf/desktop/gnome/background/%gconf.xml

I do not know if this is the expected behaviour.