Many default Startup Apps have no description

Thoughts & Feedback
#1

This should be a nice low-hanging fruit to fix.

"AT-SPI D-Bus Bus"? (Hell of a name BTW - gj GNOME team!) I know what it does, but the average user couldn't even being to guess, especially with a name like that.

"GeoClue Demo agent"?

MATE HUD - what does that do? I mean, I know what a HUD is, but I have no way of knowing if I'd want it running at startup or not.

Also, FIVE "Indicator XYZ" entries?! Am I the only one who thinks that's excessive?

Rather than just file a ticket, I thought it might be good to see if the community can come up with decent one-liner descriptions for them. Half the ones that do have descriptions aren't really at all helpful anyway. The "Spice agent", for example, has a description that basically just says "an agent for Spice" (not literally that, but literally that meaningless). Techically still better than "No description", but not exactly great. :slight_smile:

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#2

MATE HUD - what does that do? I mean, I know what a HUD is, but I have no way of knowing if I'd want it running at startup or not.

Tap Alt while focusing on a window and a fast searchable application menu should show up. It's quite similar to the Ubuntu Unity HUD. I cannot live without this thing, but of course, personal preference...

The collection of indicator applets has always been confusing to me, and I think the code should be refactored a bit to simplify the weird macro-style code paths, but not a priority at the moment.

#3

That's a good idea. I'll pass it on.

I'm wondering of the technical implications - if it's specific packages (upstream) that need chasing to add/amend their description (i.e. it installs it's own autostart file) .... or if Ubuntu MATE creates the files.... or a mix of both.

Localised translations are important to consider too.

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#4

Thanks vkareh (though it doesn't actually work for me: the process isn't running despite being enabled, and starting it manually shows why: "INFO:root:The HUD is disabled via org.mate.hud in gsettings.")

I never used Unity, so I have no idea what the benefit of such a thing would be to me. I'm not sure I'm interpreting your description correctly - is it "a searchable menu of all installed applications"? - or if I'm reading that wrongly, but anyway:

The question here is really more a case of "How can we convey what these things are in the 6 words or so available?". Or at the very least, make it possible for people to be able to match them with the things running on their machines.

One especially bad example is the popup mini-terminal thing that appeared in 16.04 (I can't remember the name). It was enabled by default, and it claimed a function key without even using a modifier. I ended up getting panicked phone calls saying "There's a black strip across the screen, and I can't get rid of it!", etc.
That's obviously a worst-case scenario, between enabling something no "Typical User" would ever want, it claiming the key it did, and so on. I don't have any machines with it still installed so I can't check if it had a description or not, but even a not-completely-clueless user would struggle to remove that sort of thing even if they knew about Startup Applications if the only thing in there was "Guake, No Description". :frowning:

@lah7 - I hadn't thought about upstream. Ugh. At a minimum though, at least some are clearly MATE (the HUD, for example) so even if only some of them can be fixed at the distro level that's still better than none of them. :slight_smile:

#5

Ah, got it, I think I see what you're saying. Maybe the descriptions should be better, you're right, I've never considered that part.