The menus are now also shown all the time

Feb 22, 2015 18:26 GMT  ·  By

Ubuntu 15.04 (Vivid Vervet) will implement Locally Integrated Menus by default, making this a very important change for Unity and the operating system.

When Canonical decided to put the menus for all the apps in the top bar, similarly to Mac OS X, a lot of people disagreed with the decision. In time, users came to embrace this solution. With Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, Canonical also provided Locally Integrated Menus. These are the same menus, but they are placed in the title bar for the application's window. It saves a lot of space, especially if the user has a very large display.

As it turns out, Locally Integrated Menus (LIM) are now quite popular and no one is actually against them. Users had a chance to try them out and it makes sense for Canonical to make this new mode default for Ubuntu 15.04. An added bonus is that this method of displaying menus is actually quite unique and no other desktop environment has it.

Locally Integrated Menus have been refined

Ubuntu devs didn't just set LIM by default in 15.04 ((Vivid Vervet), they have also improved the way it's displayed. Until Ubuntu 14.10, the menus appeared only when the user hovered with the mouse, but now they will be shown all the time.

"Decorations, Panel: add menus for unfocused windows as well. Now the indicator-appmenu exports the menus for all the windows, then it's up to us to filter them based on their parent window and show on relevant place.Also, set LIM as default now," is noted in the merge entry on Launchpad.

This is not exactly surprising and it's one of the few major (visual) changes for Ubuntu 15.04. Users can download the daily build of Ubuntu 15.04 and give it a spin. It has already hit feature freeze, so very few new features will be added from now on.