Edit: This worked for me in Zorin! Thanks for the ideas & discussion in the replies! https://www.zdnet.com/article/how-to-create-folders-in-gnome-44-to-declutter-the-application-overview

Hi, I’m looking to switch to Linux full-time on my desktop. Aside from my NAS, I’m pretty unfamiliar with Linux in general.

On Windows, I have apps pinned to the Start menu grid, with apps in groups/folders for easy access. I don’t pin anything to the taskbar or leave icons on the desktop. For the apps I care about most - and there’s around 40 of them - they’re available with just 3 clicks maximum. I can reorder them and put them in groups (or pull them out of groups) anytime.

Here’s what that looked like (note the top row): https://i.imgur.com/Y9PmYoG.png

On Zorin OS (Ubuntu-based) via Gnome, I haven’t had any such luck. ArcMenu is great but offers no app group support. This also a feature that doesn’t seem to be in very strong demand in general. I can use the Gnome menu editor (Alacarte, rebranded as “Main Menu” in Zorin) to hide the default categories & make my own. This would be a perfectly suitable solution… but doing so requires multiple steps per app - no copying & pasting, no drag & drop, each one has to be created on a per-category basis. The amount of effort is considerable. I don’t mind doing it once of course, but if I decide to reorganize, it’ll require all of that effort all over again.

I’m fully happy with Gnome, I’m looking for a productivity-first DE and the only issue is this app menu situation which is a hard deal breaker. I guess I just have three questions:

  1. Are there alternative menus I can check out which might be able to solve this?

  2. I doubt this, but: Is there an easier menu-category editor I could use? Something that allows for at least moving/copying between categories, so I can grab an app from All Apps or something and put it where I want it. Choosing a unique name, finding an icon, copying the terminal command, etc. is a ton of work just to stay organized.

  3. Would using a different DE offer the flexibility I’m looking for in this situation? I’m willing to switch DEs or even distros to fix this - it’s seriously the crux of my workflow.

If this is the wrong community to post this, please point me in the right direction and I’ll post there. Thanks in advance, I’ve been trying to find a fix for this for several hours and I’m not sure where to look for an answer.

  • just_another_person@lemmy.world
    11·
    1 day ago

    I might be getting hung up on this confusing part:

    “…it lacks app grouping support of any kind…”

    I’m looking at it right now, and it has groups, it’s just manual. Is your issue that it’s not automatically grouping things? In order to do that, there would need to exist information in whatever method of installing packages to give it some sort of category to group by.

    That’s just generally not how the Linux ecosystem works at all, mainly because there is no one DE, hence not many packages baking in direct support of one vs another.

    • Amphy@lemmy.caOPEnglish
      1·
      1 day ago

      I think I did a poor job of explaining things, sorry!

      So here’s what I could do on Windows:

      1. Right-click and app in the All Apps list, pin to Start

      2. Drag & drop pinned apps on top of one another, which creates a group

      The result I was able to accomplish on Windows looks like this (note the top row, all groups with app pins inside): https://i.imgur.com/Y9PmYoG.png

      On Linux, using Gnome and ArcMenu, I can get close to accomplishing a similar result using the Enterprise layout: https://i.imgur.com/btNKjtj.png

      I can edit those categories on the left of the menu using Alacarte, so I have the grouping I want and the pins inside that I want… but I can’t just drag & drop app commands, or even copy & paste them. So for every app I want in a specific category, the process is:

      1. Create the category, if it doesn’t exist already

      2. Name the category

      3. Give the category a description

      4. Give the category an icon (required) and save it

      5. Create a new item in the category

      6. Either figure out the launch command or copy it from an existing entry elsewhere

      7. Give it a unique name (required)

      8. Give it an icon (required), which means hunting for it if I don’t already know where it is

      And then it’ll work. But, steps 5-8 are required for every single app… so if I want to put an app in a category, I have to perform those 4 steps every time. It’s a solution but it requires a notable amount of time and effort.

      • just_another_person@lemmy.world
        21·
        1 day ago

        Ah, yeah. The manual nature of it is either a pro or con, depending. I don’t think there is a workaround for that if you’re not able to just drag and drop menu entries for existing menus because it’s in a different context. It SHOULD use the same launcher format as Gnome though, being an extension and all, so maybe have a look at where on the filesystem it’s creating the entries, and see if you can just cp existing launcher configs over to Arcmenu, or symlink them.