Ubuntu/11.10

About

the new-style scrollbar

Ubuntu version 11.10 further entangles the new Unity desktop manager into the system, rendering even the optional Gnome desktop manager difficult to use.

disappearing menus

Unity places some application menus in the screen's top bar, somewhat like MacOS, removing them from the application's window(s). Aside from the aesthetic issues, this also causes those applications to be essentially unusable under other desktop managers installed on the same system because the application's menu does not show up anywhere.

In the case of at least one application (Kate), the cause seems to be a configuration setting:

There's a configuration line that appears in N+1 different places, where N is however many sessions you have saved; encountering any of them causes it to get written to the others at the next opportunity.

1. ~/.kde/share/config/katerc

N. ~/.kde/share/apps/kate/sessions/*.katesession

The line looks like this (boldfaced):

[MainWindow]
Height 900=700
MenuBar=Disabled

Close Kate, delete that line in all files (katerc and the .katesession files), and reload Kate -- the menu should display.

Links:

• 2011-06-04 How to Get Classic Gnome Menu in Unity
• posts by Woozle:
  • 2011-11-05 some steps I went through while figuring this out
  • 2011-10-24 after removing some libraries to try and fix it
  • 2011-10-20 Kate's menu unavailable in Gnome

Reviews

• User:Woozle/Unity desktop manager