This little issue drove me around the bend for a few days until I managed to fall over a solution.
It was my own fault. Looking at all those wonderful looking KDE setups over on the Kreddit. I knew well I would not enjoy a Mac clone KDE environment, but for the sake of trying and understanding I gave it a try. I installed Latte dock with it’s ‘extended’ profile option, watched a few tutorials and soon enough had a worthy clone. There I was with it all looking very non KDE, it felt slower to use (though that’s probably from lack of use). And I hated it. So I removed the top panel, and not seeing an obvious way to turn off the Latte dock I uninstalled. Choose the breeze global theme and applied its default desktop layout to get everything almost back to normal. Then rebooted.
Something was off though when I booted back in. My menu bar at the top of each application was gone. Nowhere to be found. So that we are on the same page, this is the region I am talking about;
Trying to apply the defaults to every setting’s section got me nowhere. Right clicking and looked to edit the toolbars did nothing either. So off I went to the forums. Guess what, I was not the only person in the world to have lost the menu bar, but whatever set of instructions I tried to follow I still could not bring it back.
One post on the KDE forum I found which went through all the likely candidates;
To keep me going I added “applications” button to my titlebar as detailed in the responses to this post;
I did have a look at a few bug reports, but this did not feel like a bug. I thought that my messing with the appearance did the damage. Though it was a bug report about a similar issue that got me thinking that the issue may be connected to me installing the Global Menu widget into the top panel of latte dock and when I removed latte dock it just kept that functionality turned on somewhere in the background.
Also tried opening the individual application setting files found in /home/[user]/.config folder. In those I looked for references to ‘menubar=disabled’ and either deleted the line or changed it to ‘enabled ‘ (depending on the advice found online). Again, still no menu bar.
So in the end I took a gamble and copied those same settings files from my laptop which also has KDE Neon installed and replaced the equivalent version’s on the PC. I started with ‘konsolerc’ and ‘dolphinrc’ just to see if any effect.
Boom.
Menu bar back in konsole. Then I started opening other applications such as Kontact, and they all had returned to normal.
It drove me bonkers for a few days and nothing I found online helped, and this seemed to have sorted it for me. If you are experiencing the same maybe this will help, and I appreciate much of the headache is down to my own tinkering. But that’s the fun of it all too. I do suggest to start with basics first as detailed in the links above.
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