"Remove From Panel" is intrinsically too easy, but also extrinsically because "Add to Panel..." is much harder.
On yesterday, I had the opportunity to talk with one of my few friends who is not a CS major nor graduated.
We turned on his PC, and the dialog was as follows:
- Hey, I have Ubuntu! (Ubuntu 10.04)
- Let's use it
- I never use it
- Why?
- One day I removed this lettered menu from the bar (he was referring to Main Menu) and it took me hours to find the way to restore it.
- Yup (I was crying but I'm tough so I did not let the tears go out)
So you have to realize that, currently, users are at just 2 clicks of making their Ubuntu *useless* and rest without a clue of how restore it; just right clicking on the Main Menu and clicking on "Remove From Panel".
Solutions:
a) A confirmation dialog such as "Are you sure you want to remove Main Menu from this panel? [Yes] [[No]]" for all menu items
b) Like a) but just for the default menu items, such as Main Menu, the clock, the desktops, the trash, ...
c) A whole new way to manage items in panels...
d) ... other ideas
... now I realize we are moving to Unity and Gnome is going 3.0 so fixing this perhaps is going to be useless soon. Anyway I felt this was a significant fail to be shared.
Confirming this as a paper cut. I've lost count of the number of times I've had to re-add the recycle bin to my panel after accidentally removing it when I meant to empty it.