For some reason, the folks at GNOME (the “usability” team) decided to turn off icons in menus. Not only does it make them look ugly as hell, but it is nigh on impossible to navigate menus visually.
I am a very visually-oriented person, so this makes GNOME very difficult to use. I find myself constantly selecting the wrong items, even though removing the icons doesn’t actually change their position.
But as if that wasn’t bad enough, the “usability” team has taken the KDE approach to the problem. Rather than setting an obvious and sane default (i.e. enable icons in menus), there is a checkbox to enable the icons again. Brilliant! (not)
So you can go to System → Preferences (the first item in the menu, in case you prefer to navigate visually with icons like me) → Appearance (the second item in the menu), and under the Interface tab, you can check the box “Show icons in menus” to get the menu icons back, which gives temporary relief.
Like many GNOME features, this one is only partly implemented. GNOME’s new ‘feature’ also removes stock icons from buttons, and the above option does not put them back (well, seeing as though it is captioned “Show icons in menus” I don’t see why it would, but if you’re going to take the KDE approach, you may as well go the whole hog and add another option still).
At first, I thought this was a bug in Ubuntu Karmic (I am running the alpha on my desktop right now). While there’s nothing like being able to have the suspense of not knowing whether your computer will boot up in the morning, I thought this was preposterous. After I found out it was an intentional change (167 KB PDF), it now seems that it’s plain baloney.
I take it you would prefer to edit some undocumented (it’s gnome after all!) xml file?
I’m not quite working out what you’re complaing about, otherwise…
I’d much prefer them to remove the option, and re-enable menu icons for all users.
Then, they should consider culling certain menu icons without destroying them all in one fell swoop. I don’t disagree there has been a problem with visual clutter with many menus from too many icons as of late.
But I think a world without any menu icons whatsoever is simply abysmal. While Windows isn’t exactly known for applying menu icons like chocolate sauce, it does make use of them when appropriate.
(And on the other side of the coin, you have Mac OS X, which uses no menu icons whatsoever, that I fear GNOME may be trying to emulate.)
Have you tried
/desktop/gnome/interface/buttons_have_icons
/desktop/gnome/interface/menus_have_icons
in gconf-editor?
I think this is a rather strange move by the gnome people btw. It’s going to alienate some gnome fans for sure.
Aha, that would do the trick — thanks. They should either re-enable both of them, or add checkboxes for both items.
I would really like to know the facts behind these kind of changes.How about having the tapping on touchpad disabled by default? I believe it is enabled on a standard installation of most of the other operating systems.And it was enabled with the version that shipped with ubuntu 9.04 …
Tapping is disabled by default? Eurgh. I really hope that’s not the case.
I have to say, a lot of the decisions made in Ubuntu and GNOME are really not very transparent.
My bad. In fact this is not a gnome issue.
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/xserver-xorg-input-synaptics/+bug/378391
Aha, good to know it’s been fixed too.
“A common complaint about GNOME is that it has a certain fetish for icons.”
If anything I always loved icons in Gnome.
http://www.osnews.com/story/21935/GNOME_To_Drop_Icons_in_Buttons_Menus
However, I do think Nautilus, Rhythmbox, Evolution and etc do look better this way, since it’s saving you screen space, but menus definitely not.
Either way thanks for the “fix”
Oh thank you for that option! As well as for Pelle who suggested about icons in buttons as well!
In Lucid, the Appearance applet does not have the interface tab.
Like someone pointed out the gconf keys above, this might help: