Bug 412548 - Gui to whitelist/blacklist applications for global menu export (workaround for broken applications)
Summary: Gui to whitelist/blacklist applications for global menu export (workaround fo...
Status: RESOLVED UPSTREAM
Alias: None
Product: plasmashell
Classification: Plasma
Component: Global Menu (show other bugs)
Version: master
Platform: Neon Linux
: NOR wishlist
Target Milestone: 1.0
Assignee: Kai Uwe Broulik
URL:
Keywords: accessibility
Depends on:
Blocks:
 
Reported: 2019-10-03 08:25 UTC by leftcrane
Modified: 2020-01-27 16:28 UTC (History)
5 users (show)

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Description leftcrane 2019-10-03 08:25:44 UTC
Some applications are broken with global menu. Examples:

- Libreoffice with GTK3 theme doubles the menuitems.
- Unity3D https://www.reddit.com/r/kde/comments/dcniuz/disable_global_menu_for_unity3d/
- Emacs needs to be explictly whitelisted to display the global menu.

This breakage, while infrequent, can be very serious and I don't see it getting fixed in a timely manner upstream (it's out of KDE's control), unfortunately.

KDE should not attempt to fix the problematic apps by putting in overrides. If the app is broken with global menu by default, then it should be remain broken until it's actually fixed. However, the user should be able to quickly fix stuff on their own end by whitelisting or blacklisting apps. 

Nobody knows how to whitelist emacs for example, thus users can't access the global menu. Nobody knows where to get the experimental QT vcl to make the LOffice menubar work. Unity3D is supposedly just plain broken. So it would be nice to have a troubleshooting pane, perhaps with some presets that can be enabled or disabled. It would be nice if these overrides would propagate to latte dock and and the future HUD as well.
Comment 1 Nate Graham 2019-10-07 00:24:18 UTC
> Libreoffice with GTK3
Don't use that, use the KDE5 VCL, which works better in the latest versions of LO (i.e not the older versions that Ubuntu is shipping).

For the other apps, can you link to the bugs you've filed for the app developers? Even if we work around their breakage on our side by offering a user-facing override, they need to be made aware so they can eventually fit it in their apps.
Comment 2 leftcrane 2019-10-07 13:31:28 UTC
Sure, problem is that many people are stuck with it (at least by default) unless they are using the latest packages. 

In general there seem to be issues handling dynamic and lazy loaded menus, or menus that for some reason just don't load in their entirety at the start of the program. This is a different program from LO.

Examples of the loading problem:

* JetBrains suite (last time I used it), submenus wouldn't load - the bug was reported here.

* Copy-Q, uses dynamic menus which cause the global menu to stop being exported:  bug report on gh https://github.com/hluk/CopyQ/issues/1206

* Figma desktop, plugin menus and submenus will fail to load intermittently: https://github.com/ChugunovRoman/figma-linux (haven't reported the bug)

Seems like there's a pattern, so maybe the problem might be fixable at the level of the toolkit or even the plasmoid.

Other kinds of problems have been spotted with LO, Emacs, and Unity 3D, as already mentioned.
Comment 3 leftcrane 2019-10-07 13:32:28 UTC
edit: This is a different *problem from LO.
Comment 4 David Edmundson 2019-10-07 14:12:31 UTC
How can we blacklist an app?

Clients will see a global menu service is registered and then hide their own.

Potentially we could throw an error register window, but even our implementation doesn't check that, it seems optimistic to think these already broken 3rd party ones will.  

I tested that by `kill -STOP `pidof kded5` and seeing if a newly spawned kwrite had a menu after the timeout. It did not.

Given it's a technical feature request rather than a bug report, marking as needsinfo for original reporter.
Comment 5 leftcrane 2019-10-07 20:40:37 UTC
Yeah, silly of me to not have thought of this. I don't think QT clients can be blacklisted, for example.

AFAIK, the only ones that can are those that rely on appmenu-gtk module (org.appmenu.gtk-module blacklist/whitelist). So from the list that's only emacs - which should be easily fixable  upstream - and that's it.

So this is a limitation of DbusMenuProxy.
Comment 6 Christoph Feck 2019-10-22 00:40:42 UTC
So should we close this bug as an 'upstream' issue?
Comment 7 Bug Janitor Service 2019-11-06 04:33:10 UTC
Dear Bug Submitter,

This bug has been in NEEDSINFO status with no change for at least
15 days. Please provide the requested information as soon as
possible and set the bug status as REPORTED. Due to regular bug
tracker maintenance, if the bug is still in NEEDSINFO status with
no change in 30 days the bug will be closed as RESOLVED > WORKSFORME
due to lack of needed information.

For more information about our bug triaging procedures please read the
wiki located here:
https://community.kde.org/Guidelines_and_HOWTOs/Bug_triaging

If you have already provided the requested information, please
mark the bug as REPORTED so that the KDE team knows that the bug is
ready to be confirmed.

Thank you for helping us make KDE software even better for everyone!
Comment 8 Edward Joacquinn 2020-01-27 16:25:09 UTC
Global menu has most of options grayish and unusable, but once I deactivate global menu, these options get into the Unity3D interface and I can normally use those.
Comment 9 Nate Graham 2020-01-27 16:28:20 UTC
That sounds like a bug in the Unity app rather than anything we can fix. Please report it to them.