Global menu (appmenu) environment setting should be disabled/avoided when using gnome-shell instead of Unity

[mlaverdiere]

I'm on Oneiric 11.10 freshly updated, using gnome-shell. Please note that this report is not really about a bug, it's more about some fine tuning for Ubuntu gnome-shell users.

As everyone knows, Ubuntu Unity relies on global menu (on the upper bar). Technically, this involves, among other things, that when an X session is started to load Unity (and Gnome back-end, etc.), an environment variable is set by the /etc/X11/Xsession.d/80appmenu-gtk3 (provided by the appmenu-gtk3 package) and /etc/X11/Xsession.d/80appmenu (provided by the appmenu-gtk package) scripts, like this:

UBUNTU_MENUPROXY="libappmenu.so"

To avoid using the global menu, someone has to set this environment variable like this:

UBUNTU_MENUPROXY=0

Now, when using gnome-shell, instead of Unity, on an Ubuntu 11.10 installation and launching a gtk(3) app., you can observe that there is a slight, but noticeable, delay before the menu appears within the application. Nothing too dramatic, but just enough to make the gnome-shell experience not as great at it could be.

My suggestion/wish would be to make the above mentioned scripts determine what shell is loading (Unity, gnome-shell or...) before setting the environment variable to use, or not, the global menu. Another way to achieve this I guess would be to include in the gnome-shell package, a script that would disable this setting, when gnome-shell is loading. (I'm not so good at Xsession scripting myself, so I let other more knowledgeable people figure this out).

Thanks.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[Valentin (valentin-stn)]

I can confirm this error. Please solve this problem.

[John Nowak (john-nowak)]

I have this issue as well. For what it's worth, bug #849245 indicates that this may be due to an Ubuntu-specific patch to GTK rather than the appmenu itself. I tried removing the indicator-appmenu package entirely and still had the same problem (although maybe that's because the variable is still being set).

[Thomas E Jenkins (thomas-jenkins)]

To clarify my comment in bug #849245, I had checked the delay was removed by using a GTK+ without the UbuntuMenuProxy patch in oneiric. I don't know if the situation has changed in precise and I have no easy means to check as I've a PPA based oneiric gnome-shell machine and have moved my other machine to Debian.

[mlaverdiere (mlaverdiere)]

I'm in Precise now and as far as I can see, there is no more delay for the menu to appear when launching a gtk app within gnome-shell. I would close this report then.

[Antono Vasiljev (antono)]

In either case menuproxy should be disabled in gnome-shell koz it may cause other bugs like this:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gnome-terminal/+bug/809500