Setting UBUNTU_MENUPROXY is not effective anymore

[Sebastien Bardeau]

When using Gnome-Unity:

- in Ubuntu 13.04, setting the environment variable UBUNTU_MENUPROXY to any value used to bring back the menu at the top of the application window. This could be done per application, e.g.
$ UBUNTU_MENUPROXY=1 gedit

- in Ubuntu 14.04 and 15.04, this environment variable is not effective anymore.

As far as I know, there is no way to restore the classical menus for:
- non root users,
- users who wants to keep this Unity feature for all other applications except desired ones,
- applications setting this environment variable in order to ensure their menus are still in the window.

As of today, menu-only applications (empty window with menus) are purged from all menus and result in a 2 pixels-wide window. This has been working for decades and this is still correctly supported on all other operating systems and/or window managers.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

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

[Alberto Salvia Novella (es20490446e)]

Having a menu only is a weird interface design in my opinion, and very unpleasant to use.

[Sebastien Bardeau (bardeau)]

This "weird" interface design has been used for 20 years under many platforms without user complaints. Only Gnome Unity, as it is configured for desktop users, is breaking this design.

Anyway, the discussion of what is pleasant or not is beyond this bug report. We need to have a way to disable this Unity "feature". For now my only option is to discourage our users to use Unity, or at least to uninstall the package indicator-appmenu.