Ubuntu 14.04 Trusty Tahr: After getting new GTK3 CSS themed window decorations and other interesting changes this week, Unity has received yet another new feature: locally integrated menus, or LIM.
Locally integrated menus are displayed in the window decorations for unmaximized windows, instead of the default Unity approach which is to display the menu on the top panel. There is one thing that the default Unity menu and LIM have in common: both are displayed on mouse over and there's no option to make the menu permanently visible, at least not yet.
As for maximized windows, the menu continues to be displayed on the top panel when using LIM.
This type of menu was first announced at the beginning of 2012 and was supposed to be added to Ubuntu 12.04 but it was subsequently delayed until now, when this feature finally landed in Ubuntu 14.04 Trusty Tahr, though it's a bit different: instead of a menu button, the menus are displayed directly in the titlebar.
LIM is is not enabled by default in Ubuntu 14.04 for now, but it can easily be enabled via System Settings > Appearance, on the Behavior tab:
However, according to Marco Trevisan (the developer behind this feature), LIM might become default for Ubuntu 14.04, depending on community feedback:
"As this is an LTS release, before setting this menu mode as the default we wanted to have some community feedback."
Some LIM-related settings such as the click movement threshold or the double click wait are not available in System Settings but can be found in Dconf-editor, under com > canonical > unity > integrated-menus.
Besides LIM, another important set of changes landed in Unity, for HiDPI support. Since I can't test this (I don't have a HiDPI monitor), I'm not sure how well HiDPI is currently supported in Unity and if more changes are required for a proper HighDPI experience.
This update should be available to all Ubuntu 14.04 users in a few minutes.
This update should be available to all Ubuntu 14.04 users in a few minutes.
