Ubuntu Gnome Application Menu Missing

I have had a rather annoying problem on my Ubuntu box for the last few days. Not sure how it happened, but my application menu suddenly stopped working. Whenever I clicked on the menu I just got a tiny grey box with nothing in it where the menu should have been.

After a lot of googling with no success, I finally stumbled on a post that mentioned some files in ~/.config/. When I had a look in there, there was a subdirectory called menus which contained a file called applications.menu. I had a look at that file, and sure enough it was empty. After having a quick look at my other Ubuntu box I noticed that box had no applications.menu, so I deleted the empty file and hey presto!

6 Responses to “Ubuntu Gnome Application Menu Missing”

  1. CK Rock says:

    Just the solution I was looking for. Thanks!

  2. iv4o says:

    Thanks!! This did the trick.

  3. Corey says:

    Thanks for pointing me in the right direction, this was getting annoying.
    I’m running Gentoo and I had the same problem you described, but for me I had to run
    ln -s /etc/xdg/menus/gnome-applications.menu ./applications.menu
    after remmoving applications.menu before anything reappeared.

  4. P Ko says:

    You rock! Fixed my problem!

  5. tom says:

    I wish to hug you, man! You saved me a lot

  6. Alex says:

    Thanks – that was an easy fix to an incredibly obnoxious problem :D

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