I’ve tried out the Mutiny layout and encountered some strange issues that I need some quick help on. Here are some of the issues I’ve encountered thus far after a fresh install and some tinkering;
MATE menu is broken? Even after I made it so it’s “Iconified” and more belonging to the left panel, MATE Menu still malfunctions and refuses to show. In the top menu it appears just fine.
Select applications, like Firefox and LibreOffice don’t show the menubar in the topmenu applet
The topmenu applet isn’t transparent, but uses gtk theme settings to render a background.
All of this confuses me, and all of this should probably had been resolved after a year’s worth of effort.
I figured I should add a little more to explain the points above, so here goes;
I want to use the MATE menu over the Main Menu applet that comes with MATE. It baffles me why some applications don’t work with topmenu without configuration as I would think part and parcel of the panel layout would be to perform a sanity check and ensure it works as expected. Since 16.10, MATE panels support true transparency that doesn’t just render your background with colour on top, why topmenu needs to render anything behind it is beyond me, unless it’s some limitation of how rendering the menubar works.
MATE menu is broken? Even after I made it so it's "Iconified" and more belonging to the left panel, MATE Menu still malfunctions and refuses to show. In the top menu it appears just fine.
Which applet are you talking about exactly (there are three menu applets in MATE)? If it's the "Advanced MATE Menu", I've tried it recently in a left panel and found out that it needs quite some space to be displayed. Does it appear when you make the panel larger?
Select applications, like Firefox and LibreOffice don't show the menubar in the topmenu applet
It's a known limitation in TopMenu (which is not developed by the MATE devs). There's a new alternative (Vala Panel AppMenu, see WebUpd8's post) that is compatible with more apps, especially LibreOffice. Note that it has some issues too
Nope. What does happen, however is the menu appearing when the panel is set to the right. Then when I set panel to left it remains. Upon replace it doesn't show again. There is no schema for individual panels. If there was, then I could (in theory) make a script to have the right-most panel set to the left upon login, with a sleep to make the menu show before changing orientation.
I'm not going to mince words; This sucks. Mutiny sucks, the MATE menu's issues sucks, but hey, I can't knock the system too hard for this; Most people get away from Ubuntu to not deal with Unity, and it makes little sense to make a Unity-like unless there are Canonical Ubuntu users who need that kind of interface so badly.
Here's what kills me about the advanced menu not working; People coming from Unity will expect the advanced menu to work. Maybe even, with the menu icon already set up. They'll expect it to work with the Windows key, and they'll expect the dock applet to work.
The dock applet, however doesn't work with Compiz 0.8, causing the dock applet to act mentally-challenged with attention-demanding applications. Plank doesn't support the advanced menu by means of an applet. There's not an applet for DockbarX, which would work with Compiz 0.8 but there is one for XFCE and that uses xfconf quite comfortably.
@Wimpyread this. If nothing else, read this. You can drop plank and MATE dock completely if you can bring avant-window-navigator back from the grave. In older versions of Ubuntu, there was an applet for the Mint Menu, that can be repurposed to load MATE menu instead. There was at one time an applet to load DockbarX inside of AWN should people want that, I believe it still exists if you search hard enough for it. All of it would need to be brought up to code with what we have today
AWN can look supremely stylish or it can just sit there and function without style. This means as a Unity-like applet it would function just fine for this task, and it can be made to integrate seamlessly with MATE panel. It would work without issues, and people would praise you for bringing at what was one time the most simple, yet functional dock back into existence. I feel certain it would improve the Mutiny experience greatly.