Since KDE Plasma 5.9 offers the Global Menu Bar option, I tried to use it as in “Title bar button” mode. But after enabling it and restarting some applications, the menu bars disappear as expected, but the “Title bar button” does not show up.
I tried this in an updated TW in VM. It works. So it’s not a bug but something wrong with my system.
What I have done to try to bring the “Title bar button” back:
After previous described “reset configurations of kwin”, a reboot of the system brings me the menubar button. But I am now sure if deleting the cache helps on this issue.
After the final step, I just got another config panel at the top of my desktop just like the one on the bottom. Maybe it isn’t supported in Tumbleweed’s version of 5.9 yet?
I was able to get the titlebar menu button by editing the buttons as suggested in the article after choosing “Title bar button” mode. To edit the buttons, just navigate to “System Settings” > “Application Style” > “Window Decorations” > “Buttons”, and click-and-hold the “Application menu button” to drag it to the title bar above the buttons repository.
This is just a workaround. Comparing to this, the “Title bar button” automatically appears in my VM installation of TW (without any modification of settings and no extra applications besides default installation).
But later, I found that the “Title bar button” has some glitches. For example, when I click on it in order to select an action from the submenu, the dropdown menu folds back before I can click on some buttons. It happens frequently. So I am not using this feature for now. Hopefully, it will get more robust. Or I will do a fresh install of my system sometime.
This is another mode of global menu, named “Application menu widget”. It doesn’t attract me because the separated menu bar from application make me uncomfortable.
But you probably just created a new default panel on the top, which will of course look the same as the one on the bottom.
You need to add a “Global Menu” plasmoid/widget somewhere, this can be in a panel or directly on the desktop.
Haven’t read the article you linked to, but I suppose the suggested thing to do would be to create an empty panel on the top of the screen and then add the “Global Menu” widget to it (right-click on the toolbox icon on the right edge and choose “Add Widgets”). This would give you a MacOS like application menu on the top of the screen, not hidden by windows.
In my case, the Title bar buttons will not show up for some of the applications, such as Dolphin, if they are resumed from a stored session, otherwise they are good. For those apps not worked currently, just to close and reopen might brings the buttons back. If your situations are different, then I am out of ideas.
Then check that the “Application menus daemon” is activated and running in systemsettings5->Startup and Shutdown->Background Services.
Also, you need to set the Menubar style to “Application Menu widget” in systemsettings5->Application Appearance->Widget Style->Finetuning, but I suppose you did that anyway…