Local Menus and app-indicator don't work when running as root or invoking as root with "gksu" [video demo]

[Michael Tunnell]

Video Demo: http://youtu.be/jFrSjHgpMEI

This is a small usability bug for the Local Menus in Ubuntu 14.04. This will probably not be experienced by most people and I pretty much just stumbled across this bug myself so it probably wouldn't be a high priority but I wanted to submit it anyway.

The bug occurs when running as root or invoking root with gksu. Another bug is found when invoking with gksu using the "-k" option to stay in the user environment.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

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

[George Karavasilev (kokoto-java)]

This also happen with the global menu and it's been like that since they were introduced. If that comment is of any assistance.

[Mateusz Stachowski (stachowski-mateusz)]

This won't change it's because of permissions.

Marco Trevisan comment from his blog introducing LIM:

Unfortunately we can't access to the menus of a root application... I it's just a simple matter of permissions...

http://blog.3v1n0.net/informatica/linux/ubuntu-introducing-locally-integrated-menus-to-unity-7/#comment-1255930051

[Alex Baggott (alex-baggott)]

As part of the big bug review for 16.04 LTS, I have tested this on 15.10 and the bug is still there.

Although sub menus do appear upon pressing, for instance, Alt +F, when Nautilus is launched using gksu, they DON'T appear when it's launched using gksu -k.

From what I understand, gksu has been deprecated in favour of pkexec. I tested the bug by creating a Nautilus policy file and launching it using pkexec, finding that the menus appear below the title bar (as when launching using gksu). However, I don't know how environment preservation (invoked with the -k flag in gksu) pertains to pkexec, so perhaps someone with more knowledge of this can weigh in?