I’m using Linux Mint. I had to go browse the menu’s to see in which category KiCad was. I normally start KiCad either by hitting the “menu” button (which has some wavy flag on my keyboard) and typing the first few letters of “kicad”, or by a file browser and then double clicking on a project name.
If I am working on a more involved project for some longer time, then I create a launcher, and write a small script that starts multiple programs when that launcher is clicked. So with one click it starts for example:
File browser with the project directory opened
programming IDE
KiCad
Logic Analyzer (Sigrok/Pulseview) for my Kingst LA2016.
All launchers are in my taskbar / menu / panel. I do not have any icons on my desktop. I find that useless, because they are nearly always covered by open windows. (I never got the hang of minimizing all desktop applications to get to those icons.).
That’s a very windows centric thinking.
In windows when applications are installed and a “start menu” entry is added,.it is a simplex directory structure AND it is even worse for windows10,11 as they flatten it even more (and as someone that has 5 version of matlab installed this is bad…). You end up hunting for a tradename application not the role of the application… searching for hyperlyxn (or Valor) on my machine when I forget what they are called (or some graduate who has never heard of them ) is harder than expanding against a category
Linux proposed something decades ago and they proposed some categories since “I need todo some art” is more natural thinking than “I need Photoshop™”. The base 13 I linked earlier shows this. This was further expanded to cover a much wider list BUT applications still need to provide backwards compatibility if some application menu parser is like 3decades OLD.
For me using labwc with an obmenu and ngwmenu Kicad appears under Electronics
Really ? it just seemed common sense to me that ECAD would be classed as an Engineering discipline rather than Science or Maths.
I do take your point that it is easy to lose applications in the windows Start menu tree especially if it’s a little used application with a not so memorable name . . . I’ve done that before.
Common sense and standards are different things.
30years ago ECAD and general maths/science were almost non-existent in Linux and it was driven mostly my server admins and also other limitations meant the categories was limited to 13 (not the 50odd today…)
Should Kicad be under electronics? Of course… Does the base spec provide that? no… Does the desktop spec provide backwards compatibility? Yes .
Basically the BUG is in KDE parsing the specification not in Kicad as it is standard compliant providing the category as "Electronics " and a fallback of “science”
What fallback would you suggest if not science? Art? Network?
Out of this list that a FSF compliant menu manager shall support, SCIENCE is the most appropriate, for fallback. This is now 2025… why is the OP using a menu generator that only complies to the BASE specification and not the Additional list, to which we have Electricity, Electronics, Engineering as accepted categories.
Even obmenu, a 20year old script, that was created for openbox but is usable for labwc complies to the Additional list…
This forum is to help KiCad users, not attack them. Perhaps you should not be so hasty to attack the person asking the question, and instead actually read what that person wrote. A good policy is to be helpful or be silent.
and this isn’t an attack, it is a redirect as to where the query needs to be laid. Kicad, as part of the *.in file, is compliant. How a distribution augments it and/or a desktop environment parses it, its not something kicad controls.
the desktop file spec indicates where an application should reside and Kicad offers SCIENCE and ELECTRONICS. ELECTRONICS is only displayable via a parser that acknowledges this part of the spec.
So… either the menu parser is non-compliant or the distro manipulated the *.in to remove ELECTRONICS. IF kicad dropped SCIENCE then there is a high chance it would not appear in menu’s that do not acknowledge the “additional list”
–edit–
I just checked… put a category that doesn’t exist and obmenu placed kicad in “other” since it was unparseable, but obmenu follows the spec so this might be what the spec request and what a non-compliant parser does is well… anyone’s guess
As an experiment I looked into editing KDE’s launcher in openSUSE which is Kicker. The menu is edited by the Menu Editor from the System category.
I was able to add a new submenu called Electronics, and then add the launcher for KiCad to it.
I have no idea if KiCad would be installed in this category if it was available at install time.
I didn’t retain my changes but reverted to the current situation: KiCad in Science & Maths, because I launch KiCad from Favourites anyway. But I did notice a stray category for wine-wine which contained only the obsolete SugatSync manager which I deleted so it was good to experiment a bit.
I think a menu hierarchy that uses all the metadata available and has heaps of categories wouldn’t make much of an impact and be used mainly by geeks. Most users just use a handful of applications most of the time, and this is where Favourites helps. I had to search the Internet a bit to find posts about the menu editor, indicating that it’s not used often.
