New applications not showing up in menu

I’ve been using OpenSUSE since 11.2, and I’ve never been fond of the default menu organization (too many subcategories; I prefer my menu to group everything under one main category, ex. Internet would have my browser, chat program, IRC client, and everything right there instead of further organized into Browsers, Chat, and so on), so I always reorganize it to my preferences as one of my first steps after a new install. Having just installed 12.1 a few days ago, this was no exception.

However, it seems that whenever I install a new program, it’s not added to the menu by default - I have to manually set up menu entries for the programs. If I use the menu’s search, KRunner, or the terminal, the applications do in fact show up - it’s not an install issue - it’s just that the menu no longer seems to organize them (tried with both the default menu and Lancelot). This had never been an issue for me in past versions of OpenSUSE, as reorganizing my menu would still result in new programs being sorted into the parent category (ex. Krita would still show up under the Graphics menu just fine even after I’d reorganize and remove the subcategories from it), and under Recently Installed. But after installing multiple programs and not having them appear anywhere in my menu I can assume this isn’t a fluke, and it’s a bit of a hassle having to use KRunner to launch programs instead of my menu.

Is this a bug? Did something change from previous versions of OpenSUSE? Is there something I can do to fix it, or will I just have to tolerate it? It’s not the end of the world if I can’t get apps into my menu automatically, but it is frustrating and I thought I might as well ask if anyone else has had experience with this issue.

I use the default menu I don’t have this problem Test a new user. Do the installed applications show in this account menu?

if KDE you can use

kbuildsycoca4 --incremental

In GNOME was present a graphic app I don’t remember.

As menus in the graphical environment are typical part of the desktop, not even mentioning which desktop software you use makes it realy difficult to answer this.

I have the same issue with Oprensuse 12.1, KDE desktop. New applications will show up in the “new applications” section of the menu, for a while, then they’ll migrate off and out. Most applications never show up under any other menus, like multimedia or system, where they properly belong, and where they do show up with other distributions.