Comment 20 for bug 84958

@Ralf Nieuwenhuijsen: I think it is perfectly reasonable to discuss adding and removing Wine menu entries here - or should I submit a new bug requesting more of them and turning this discussion into a cross-posting mess?

@dankegel: It's just text. I've found that discussing bugs with the Wine developers is a lot more irritating.

Since I'm entirely responsible for the current *.desktop files which dictate where the menu entries landed I think it would help to show my rationale for the placement.

Wine may be the unwanted bastard stepchild in the land of FOSS, especially with Mark Shuttleworth's attitude towards it in regards to Ubuntu. But I have found it to be rather critical for migrating my customers over to Linux, especially since most of them are Windows gamers. They can barely handle installing apps on Windows so any additional difficulty (like terminals) isn't going to improve the transition. They can make backups of their game saves and install add-ons following simple instructions but they mostly operate by simple repetition with a minimal understanding of the underlying processes. It reminds me of my early experience with WordPerfect users in MS-DOS. They knew what to type at a command prompt to start the app but they didn't really understand anything about what they were typing. Once they were in WordPerfect they were experts however. A large majority of the current PC consumers are in this category.

I view Wine as an application platform. To me its no different than Mono or Java. If I install apps that use Mono or Java should they be in a Mono or Java menu? Why is "Java Web Start" in the Internet menu and the "Plugin Control Panel" and "Policy Tool" in the Preference menu? Some of you may be biased towards one technology or the other and want to hide the menu entries in an submenu and give it an icon to remind everyone that it's the "evil" section but my users just want to find their games and they don't care about the underlying system. This is why I set the Wine app categories the way they are.

I'm all for improving the user experience and I'm not picky as to the exact method of doing it. Fixing Wine File so it's more usable or adding a Windows-like view of the .wine/drive_c to the default file managers both seem like good solutions to me.

Maybe the solution is to have the menu entires in a different package with a "recommend" for them on the Wine package.