Agreed! ;)

I know you're joking about "ONLY", but actually, linear drop-down menus are just an edge case of pie menus with multiple items in only one direction: down. So you can also make drop-down, -up, -left, -right, and other direction menus with a decent pie menu editor, like the Blender pie menu editor add-on.

Pie menus are much more useful if users can edit and create their own, especially in feature-rich extensible configurable applications that different people use in different ways like Gimp and Blender.

Blender has great pie menu support, and there's a nice pie menu editor add-on, but it really needs a built-in WYSIWYG pie menu editor, supporting on-the-fly direct manipulation WYSIWYG drag-and-drop pie menu editing, like Simon Schneegans's brilliant Gnome-Pie and Fly-Pie.

By "direct manipulation WYSIWYG drag-and-drop" I mean that ideally you should be able to put any existing menu into edit mode on the fly, and edit the circular pie, linear, or hybrid layout directly by dragging items around to different slices, instead of with an indirect linear scrolling list or outline in a separate window.

You need to be able directly and immediately edit them as they will appear to the user, not as some abstract linear tree outline (or god forbid, raw xml).

Pie Menu Development for Blender:

https://devtalk.blender.org/t/pie-menu-development-for-blend...

Blender Pie Menu Editor:

https://blendermarket.com/products/pie-menu-editor

Gnome-Pie (wikipedia):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gnome-Pie

Gnome-Pie (github):

https://schneegans.github.io/gnome-pie

Gnome-Pie 0.6.1:

https://vimeo.com/125339537

Fly-Pie 7: GNOME Shell 40+ and a new WYSIWYG Menu Editor!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sRT3O9-H5Xs

Fly-Pie 10: A new Clipboard Menu, proper touch support & much more!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BGXtckqhEIk

And Simon's new project, Kando:

Kando - An Open Source, Cross-Platform Pie Menu:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTdfnUDMO9k

Follow and support the project on Ko-Fi:

https://ko-fi.com/schneegans

Kando on GitHub:

https://github.com/kando-menu/kando

I also love the beautiful Trace and Coral menus he designed for his Bachelor thesis 11 years ago:

https://schneegans.github.io/news/2012/10/10/bachelor-thesis

The Trace-Menu:

https://vimeo.com/51073078

The Coral-Menu:

https://vimeo.com/51072812

More of his great stuff:

https://schneegans.github.io/

A retrospective of my 35 years of work with pie menus:

Pie Menus: A 30 Year Retrospective (2018):

https://donhopkins.medium.com/pie-menus-936fed383ff1

>Steve Jobs Thought Pie Menus Sucked: “That sucks! That sucks! Wow, that’s neat! That sucks!”

>On October 25, 1988, I gave Steve Jobs a demo of pie menus, NeWS, UniPress Emacs and HyperTIES at the Educom conference in Washington DC. His reaction was to jump up and down, point at the screen, and yell “That sucks! That sucks! Wow, that’s neat! That sucks!”

>I tried explaining how we’d performed an experiment proving pie menus were faster than linear menus, but he insisted the liner menus in NeXT Step were the best possible menus ever.

>But who was I to rain on his parade, two weeks after the first release of NeXT Step 0.8? (Up to that time, it was the most hyped piece of vaporware ever, and doubters were wearing t-shirts saying “NeVR Step”!) Even after he went back to Apple, Steve Jobs never took a bite of Apple Pie Menus, the forbidden fruit. There’s no accounting for taste!

The ideas behind pie menus have actually been around for even longer than that, since at least 1969:

Flight of the PIXIE - Yuja Wang:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jDrqR9XssJI

>Dedication and Thanks to:
Neil E. Wiseman, Heinz U. Lemke, John O. Hiles,
PIXIE: A New Approach to Graphical Man-Machine Communication,
Proceedings of 1969 CAD Conference Southampton
IEEE Conference Publication 51, pp. 463–471.
David Chapman, Cambridge University Library.
Remixing and Synchronization with AfterEffects by Don Hopkins.

>This film demonstrates an early graphical user interface in use. It was made in 1969 to accompany a paper entitled “PIXIE: a new approach to graphical man-machine communication” presented at the 1969 CAD Conference held in Southampton.

https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/library/archives.html

PIXIE ran on a PDP-7 with a Type 340 CRT vector display with a light pen, networked with the Titan at Cambridge University, and was one of the earliest examples of a network distributed gui application, developed by Neil E. Wiseman, Heinz U. Lemke, and John O. Hiles.

https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/rainbow/people/neilw.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titan_(1963_computer)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDP-7

David S H Rosenthal: Kids Today Have No Idea:

https://blog.dshr.org/2018/11/kids-today-have-no-idea.html