Well, the Self-Appointed Benevolent Dictator for Life, Mark Shuttleworth, strikes again with his new ideas for Ubuntu 10.10, Maverick Meerkat. In his blog post, he presented the idea of including global-menu in Ubuntu 10.10 Netbook edition in order to make the most of the available vertical space in netbooks.
Remember his last post, where he shared his excitement about starting experimenting again, with Maverick. Well linuxers, this is good news now, because the changes have started already.
What is this global-menu?
In case, you have ever used a Mac or seen its interface, you might have noticed its top panel, the menu of the application being used becomes the top panel i.e. all applications have a single panel aka Global Menu. Yes, ofcourse its motivated from Apple but Mark aims to do a lot more with the panel menus than Apple does.
This screenshot might give you a better idea of a global menu.
(This screenshot is take from here)
In case you are wondering, the global menu will not be a default feature in the Desktop edition because, "There are outstanding questions about the usability of a panel-hosted menu on much larger screens, where the window and the menu could be very far apart", says Mark Shuttleworth.
The reason why global menu is going to be a major change in Netbook edition is because of the small and wide display of most of the netbooks. A common screen resolution in netbooks is 1024x600 which means there is fairly less vertical space as compared to the horizontal area. So, shifting the application menu to the top panel might save some space. Actually, for the optimal case, where the application window is maximised, global menu can help save approx. 4% of vertical space.
The best part is that it will be built upon d-bus menu which works across both Gtk and Qt applications which means that it will be equally able to support GNOME and KDE applications running on UNE.
Try global menu on Desktop Editions
But this doesn't mean you can't use it on your Desktop editions, its pretty easy to do that. Go to the global-menu's ppa launchpad page and follow this tutorial - how to install softwares in Ubuntu from ppa.
If changes like this keep coming, then no doubt Mark's dream of a Perfect 10 Maverick will come true. Ubuntu Netbook Edition is emerging as a pretty good operating system for netbooks and with improvements like these, it will be the best soon.