The option to always show the Unity menus, implemented by +Marco Trevisan, has landed in Ubuntu 15.04 Vivid Vervet.
As you probably know, in the current stable Ubuntu releases (12.04, 14.04 and 14.10), the Unity (global) menus are displayed on mouseover for both the default menu that's displayed on the top Unity panel and LIM (locally integrated menu), which is displayed in the application titlebar.
With Ubuntu 15.04, there's a new option (not enabled by default) which allows setting the Unity menus to always be visible:
This option can be changed (at least for now, this is the only way) via Dconf-Editor, by going to com > canonical > unity and enabling "always show menus".
Right now, you need to restart Unity after changing the menu behavior (to restart Unity, press ALT + F2 and enter "unity" or log out and log back in) but I think this is a bug (I reported it here) because I don't remember this being required when I first tested the "always show menus" feature about 3-4 weeks ago (it was in a separate branch and not available by default in Ubuntu 15.04 back then), especially since right now, in Ubuntu 15.04 Vivid Vervet, you must also restart Unity if you want to switch to LIM, which is not the case in Ubuntu 14.04 or 14.10. But Ubuntu 15.04 Vivid Vervet is still in alpha so bugs are to be expected.
Below you can watch a quick video I've recorded under Ubuntu 15.04 Vivid Vervet (VirtualBox), demonstrating the new "always show menus" Unity feature:
(direct video link; for more videos, subscribe to our YouTube channel)
Besides this feature, the latest Unity update in Vivid also brings a fix for using Dash and HUD on top of full-screen applications (as an example, until now, you couldn't open HUD or bring up the Dash when using Firefox in full-screen).
If you're using Ubuntu 15.04 Vivid Vervet, make sure you update to Unity version "7.3.1+15.04.20150115-0ubuntu1" to be able to use this new feature. Note that if you're not using the main repositories mirror, it may take a while until the new version is available for you.
In other Unity menus-related news, JAyatana is now installed by default in Ubuntu 15.04 Vivid Vervet, meaning that the next Ubuntu release will ship with Java Swing appmenu (global menu) support by default.
In other Unity menus-related news, JAyatana is now installed by default in Ubuntu 15.04 Vivid Vervet, meaning that the next Ubuntu release will ship with Java Swing appmenu (global menu) support by default.
