Global Menu is perhaps one of the most annoying features of Unity, as it separates the menu options from within the application window, to the Gnome Panel. But disabling such Unity features isn’t as hard as you might think. For example, I previously explained the procedure of disabling the overlay scrollbar to get back the classic scrollbar in Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric and Ubuntu 11.04 Natty. In this post I will provide you with a simple method of disabling the Global Menu, to get the old integrated menu back in your Nautilus and application windows.

Disable Global Menu

To disable the Global Menu, enter the following command in the Terminal. After the command has been executed, log out or restart your computer, so that the changes can be applied. After you log back in, the integrated menu will re-appear and you will no longer have the annoying Global Menu.

sudo apt-get remove appmenu-gtk3 appmenu-gtk appmenu-qt

The below screenshot demonstrates the integrated menu that you will get, once the Global Menu is disabled.

Re-enable Global Menu

Since the global menu is disabled by removing a package, you can re-enable it anytime, by installing the respective package once more. To revert the changes, enter the following commands in the Terminal. Once the package is installed, log off or restart your computer to get back the Global Menu.

sudo apt-get install appmenu-gtk3 appmenu-gtk appmenu-qt

It will be much appreciated if Canonical for once makes it easy for Ubuntu users to choose the kind of desktop layout that they wish to keep, without forcing annoying new features on them. While some users may find a few of these new changes as refreshing (such as perhaps the overlay scrollbar or Global Menu), others are simply being alienated. In fact, many Ubuntu users are already considering the use of other operating systems because of random and unwanted changes being forced on them. Such measures by Canonical are simply not good for Linux. They should try making the new Ubuntu more stable and customizable, rather than moving ahead with unstable distributions.