I have upgraded to Tumbleweed version 20150521 (I586/KDE) several weeks ago and everything was fine. However after today’s (23/5) update the desktop looks different. However what is most annoying is that the application launcher is very unusable. I don’t use the cascading menu launcher but the what was earlier called “classical system”. Now I have two items, one called system and one called settings which are nearly identical. They start with /etc/sysconfig editor and you can scroll down to Yast. It includes e.g. Firewall, DHCP server NIS server, etc. items which were in Yast and which I don’t need (e.g. all the servers). However I have to scroll down or up to find what I need. Previously there was System settings and System with different entries.
Further we had 3-tier system. E.g. you could get to internet form there to browser and from there you could select the browser. If I now go to internet it is all in one line in alphabethical order. Is it now required to go to the KDE Menu editor to take what I don’t need out and create new sub-menus manually? Has the upgrade gone wrong? What happened to the menu?
Cheers
Uli
Something is wrong when you say you upgraded to 20150521 several weeks ago? That snapshot, only available yesterday, is the latest snapshot as of today.
The application menu’s lack of structure has been mentioned before in other posts, and has not improved since plasma 5.3 arrived in Tumbleweed. I haven’t made any changes with menu editor. I’m not seeing the problem you have with “Internet” section as it contains the original vertical list including Browsers.
That date (20150521) for the snapshot must be wrong if it was “several weeks ago”.
However after today’s (23/5) update the desktop looks different.
You are now running Plasma 5, instead of KDE4.
However what is most annoying is that the application launcher is very unusable.
I agree. It would be much nicer to have the old multi-level menus back.
As I wrote in another thread recently, openSUSE’s KDE team decided to use the upstream KDE menu structure for Plasma 5, whereas earlier SUSE’s own version was used.
You could “fix” that by copying /etc/xdg/menus/application.menu to /etc/xdg/menus/kf5-application.menu (overwriting that file), but that will of course not survive updates.
Indeed. I fully concur with that. From a usability point it doesn’t, IMHO, score very highly.
I also noticed that the ‘Hidden entry’ option is no longer in kmenuedit, so it’s not possible to hide menu entries now.
There is an option within kicker from the context menu of an individual menu item to make it hidden. That however doesn’t survive a re-login; don’t know if it’s a bug or I have some sort of permissions problem.
Thank you for all who have answered overnight. Yes first of all I upgraded to Tumbleweed several weeks ago. Before I submitted the thread I thought you might like to know the version so I used the command cat /etc/os-release and pasted the version number into the thread. When I first updated it was the version 20150508.
Wolfi323 - I renamed kf5-application.menu to kf5-application.menu.old and renamed application.menu to kf5-application.menu but the result was that I have an empty menu now. So I reversed it but the menu stayed empty. Now I am worse of as before. How do I get the launcher menu back?
Since there seem to be several who don’t like the new menu it would be good if someone could put a menu file together with a more usable configuration? Even if it needs to be copied into the right directory after every update.
Thank you again
Uli
Further to what I said before the computer now does not seem to know any more what applications are installed. When I click in Dolphin on a .png file the error message says there is no application installed to open the image. However I can type gwenview in the command line and the open the picture from there. Similar the KDE Menu Editor is completely empty without any items. I tried to rename the folder .kde4 to .kde4.old and logged off and on again and there is no change. Normally this was the last resort with KDE4 to get the default settings back. How can I do this with Plasma5?
Cheers
Uli
It should work fine if you didn’t do something wrong (like typing application.menu and kf5-application.menu instead of the correct applications.menu and kf5-applications.menu… Yes I know, I made a typo there, sorry.)
If it doesn’t, try to rebuild KDE’s cache with “kbuildsycoca5”.
Since there seem to be several who don’t like the new menu it would be good if someone could put a menu file together with a more usable configuration? Even if it needs to be copied into the right directory after every update.
As mentioned, the “old” SUSE menu is still in /etc/xdg/menus/applications.menu, as it is still used by other desktops.
KF5 has been patched by openSUSE to use kf5-applications.menu instead (which actually violates the freedesktop.org standard specification… :P)
The menu editor uses the same functions to get the menu list as the application launcher. So if the latter is empty, the former is empty to of course.
Dolphin is still KDE4 based, which uses applications.menu, but I don’t think this menu structure should make a difference for opening a file.
Still, try to run “kbuildsycoca4” too, to refresh KDE4’s cache of installed programs, menu entries, and so on.
I tried to rename the folder .kde4 to .kde4.old and logged off and on again and there is no change. Normally this was the last resort with KDE4 to get the default settings back. How can I do this with Plasma5?
Plasma5 stores its configuration in ~/.config/ instead of ~/.kde4/share/config/, and data like your changes to the application menu in ~/.local/share/ instead of ~/.kde4/share/apps/.
But I’m pretty sure, deleting those directories won’t help you, and it would also delete configurations of other non-KDE applications like all GNOME apps and LibreOffice.
You might even lose data! Like you could when deleting ~/.kde4/ already, e.g. ~/.kde4/share/apps/ or ~/.local/share/ might contain all your emails if you use KMail, the addressbook saves its contacts in ~/.kde4/share/apps/kabc/ or ~/.local/share/notes/ by default, KOrganizer’s calendar is in ~/.kde4/share/apps/korganizer/, and so on.
Hi Wolfi323
Thanks for the information and the help.
I used tab completion (I am aware of my typing skills! :() and just added/removed .old - checked in history the typing was correct.
If it doesn’t, try to rebuild KDE’s cache with “kbuildsycoca5”.
Here is the output - however nothing changes and the menu is still empty except a few in favourites and the run command in applications (added the output of kbuildsycoca4 as well):
kbuildsycoca5
:~> kbuildsycoca5 running...
kf5.kservice.sycoca: Trying to open ksycoca from "/home/uli/.cache/ksycoca5"
Reusing existing ksycoca
Recreating ksycoca file ("/home/uli/.cache/ksycoca5", version 300)
Database is up to date
Emitting notifyDatabaseChanged ()
:~> kbuildsycoca4
kbuildsycoca4 running...
Any other ideas? Can i somehow reinstall this (e.g. with zypper dup) even if the system seems to be up-to-date?
Just tried to log into LXDE and there the menu is available. Is there any way to bring it across if it is lost from Plasma5?
I remembered that I can select KDE from yast so I reinstalled it from there and now the icons are back again. But somehow the replacement of kf5-applications.menu with the content of applications.menu didn’t work. So if I configure the menu with the KDE Menu Editor to make it more usable - what will be the name of this file and where will this be? Is it possible to copy this file somewhere to overwrite the original file after updates?
Cheers
Uli
Ok.
Any other ideas? Can i somehow reinstall this (e.g. with zypper dup) even if the system seems to be up-to-date?
There’s no need to reinstall, if kf5-applications.menu is a valid file, the menu entries should be there.
LXDE uses the standard applications.menu. To bring it across to Plasma5 you’d have to copy it to kf5-applications.menu as written.
So indeed your kf5-applications.menu seems to have been missing or broken.
Even with TAB-completion you can have made a typing mistake when renaming kf5-applications.menu.old.
Btw, to get back the original kf5-applications.menu you don’t need to reinstall the whole KDE. Just the package “kservice” would be enough:
sudo zypper in -f kservice
or “Update Unconditionally” in YaST.
But somehow the replacement of kf5-applications.menu with the content of applications.menu didn’t work.
It does work here, and I see no reason why it shouldn’t work for you. And I just tried it again to be sure.
That said, try to copy applications.menu to kf5-applications.menu when not inside KDE and run “kbuildsycoca5 --noincremental” (although the latter was not even necessary here).
Try to copy/paste this to rule out typing mistakes:
cd /etc/xdg/menus
sudo mv kf5-applications.menu kf5-applications.menu.old
sudo cp applications.menu kf5-applications.menu
And maybe try to login to a fresh user account if it doesn’t work. If you edited your menu with the menu editor, this might maybe cause problems.
So if I configure the menu with the KDE Menu Editor to make it more usable - what will be the name of this file and where will this be?
The menu editor only modifies the user specific menu, and saves that in ~/.config/menus/.
Is it possible to copy this file somewhere to overwrite the original file after updates?
No. This file is incomplete, it only contains your changes to the standard menu.
Thank you, wolfi323, I have learned a lot on this new desktop (unfortunately there is not much yet on the internet - I have searched quite a lot!). Regarding the commands - they were the commands I used except I prefer to switch to root and not to use sudo. I will put the info from this thread into a file for further use on my computer. Yesterday I have cleaned up the menu with the KDE menu editor and everything seems to work fine (so far at least) so I prefer not to try around much more but use the computer as it is now. Thanks again for your friendly help.
Cheers
Uli
hi,
comment
when copying applications.menu to kf5-applications.menu within kde the experience
was identical to that seen by fuerstu
when copying applications.menu to kf5-applications.menu within a terminal say
CTL-ALT-F1 then the exerience was as stated by wolfi323
thx interesting thread
cheers
Ok, I can understand that KDE might get confused if that file changed “under its feet”.
But I’d think “kbuildsycoca5 --noincremental” and/or login/logout should fix that.
I suppose I will try when I’m getting bored…
hi,
running kbuildsycoca5 --noincremental from a terminal puts back kf5-applications.menu to its last state so it repairs the blank entries
this excercise though was to replace kf5-applications.menu with the applications.menu content
cheers
Hm?
Sorry, but kbuildsycoca5 does not modify kf5-applications.menu, and it even could not if you run it as user. (which you should do btw, it makes no sense to run it as root, as its job is to recreate the cache for user session).
hi,
not sure if kbuildsycoca5 --noincremental was run with root privileges or not, if the programs requested it then is was
afterwards the menu application list was restored, maybe this was just a coincidence due to lag time in kde
however the Launcher menus are now as per kde4 in plasma5 and its saved the necessity of reorganising
thx
It doesn’t request anything. If you run it as user, it runs as user. Otherwise KDE wouldn’t work at all…
afterwards the menu application list was restored, maybe this was just a coincidence due to lag time in kde
kbuildsycoca signals the launcher that the list has (maybe) changed, yes.
The point of a cache is not having to re-read all the involved files (menu structure, all .desktop files in several folders, …) everytime you open the menu, which would cause a (big) delay.
There is kded5 that should watch all involved files and recreate the cache automatically when something changes, but that doesn’t work in all circumstances. Maybe it just doesn’t watch for all changes in all folders either…
I think there was recently a bug about that KDE is switching back to the FDO standard. (There was definitely an issue like this I just read about in the last few days, just not sure if it was the menu or some other config file).