Xfce Forum

gaffer

Member

Registered: 2011-05-30

Posts: 2

Applications Menu Issue

Hi

I'm looking at moving away from Gnome and someone recommended XFCE to me.  I've only used it for a very short time and it looks as if it might be just right for me.

I have a specific question about the Applications Menu.  It's probably been answered before, I have seen at least one reference to this, so apologies for any duplication.

If I use the Settings -> Main Menu option to edit the menu, the whole menu disappears even if I make no changes.  I see that a new directory ~/.config/menus is created and there is an entry in that which contains a merge tag so the idea would seem to be to merge my changes with a default version and for some reason that doesn't work.  A suggested answer I have seen is to set the applications menu properties so that it uses a custom menu file, namely the default menu file in /etc/xdg/menus.  That struck me as not particularly good practice (even though I am the sole user of this laptop) so I copied the file into my .config directory and chose that as my custom menu file.  That works ok in the sense that I can now edit the menu without it vanishing, but the edits are just lost.  In fact they are stored in the menus directory as before but ignored because I'm using the custom file and that is not updated.

Any suggestions?  I'm not all that bothered, I don't use the menus all that much, but since they are there it would be nice to be able to customise them a little.

My more general question is: do any distros ship with XFCE as the primary desktop?  I have used Debian for the last couple of years, but got a bit fed up with it always being rather out-of-date and no mulitimedia stuff ever works without installing lots of extra codecs.  I'm trying out XFCE on Mint 11 to which I added the packages (v4.8) from the repository.  It's fine but might be interesting to try where it was not using various gnome stuff that's already there.  I think there is an Ubuntu version but assume it's a release or 2 behind the main gnome one (and there is something I find quite irritating about Ubuntu).  My ideal would be something Debian based because I'm used to deb package management, as up-to-date as Mint, but smaller.

Thanks

gaffer

Member

Registered: 2011-05-30

Posts: 2

Re: Applications Menu Issue

PS - slight inaccuracy in the above, the edits to the menu I have made are not actually lost but appear in the Other section rather than where I put them - still not ideal

Nick

Dev

From: ~

Registered: 2005-02-17

Posts: 1,144

Website

Re: Applications Menu Issue

Probably related to this bug: https://bugzilla.xfce.org/show_bug.cgi?id=7169

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