Arch Linux

syscrusher

Member

Registered: 2024-06-17

Posts: 7

[SOLVED] Cinnamon menu missing from Panel after migrating Mint => Arch

This problem is already solved, but it took me long enough to figure it out that I think the solution is worth sharing.

Situation:

As part of moving to a new machine, I switched from Linux Mint to Arch Linux, but I wanted to keep Cinnamon desktop environment at least for now. While logged in as root from the bare tty console (no GUI session), I copied my home directory over from the old system. Cinnamon and its dependencies were installed from Pacman.

Logging in as my regular user account, everything seemed to be in order except the Cinnamon desktop's Panel had no application launcher (the button that is roughly equivalent to "Start" on Windows). All my other settings were fine. The applet was in Cinnamon settings, and I knew Cinnamon itself was okay because creating a new user from scratch had everything working correctly. And no errors caught my attention from the logs.

Solution:

Attempting to click on the leftmost button on the Panel, I noticed that the app launcher briefly appeared -- then I realized what happened. It was not throwing errors because it was started, active, and waiting for me to click on it, but it was only a couple of pixels wide and stuck all the way against the left edge of the screen.

I was able to open its properties and that revealed the launcher had a missing icon. The old system had a custom icon that wasn't present by default in Arch, so the applet tried to fail gracefully by showing no icon at all. Once I disabled the option for a custom icon, the default popped right into place, and all is well.

TL;DR:

If Cinnamon Desktop has seems to be working overall but has a missing applet, and you migrated the home directory from another system, check to see if the applet may actually be present but missing its icon.

seth

Member

Registered: 2012-09-03

Posts: 60,798

Re: [SOLVED] Cinnamon menu missing from Panel after migrating Mint => Arch

Please don't post PSAs - I've not read the post but if there's actually any valuable information in it, that would belong into the wiki.
It'll just get lost here.

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syscrusher

Member

Registered: 2024-06-17

Posts: 7

Re: [SOLVED] Cinnamon menu missing from Panel after migrating Mint => Arch

Please don't post PSAs - I've not read the post but if there's actually any valuable information in it, that would belong into the wiki.
It'll just get lost here.

Understood and will refrain in the future.

Last edited by syscrusher (2024-06-17 20:30:08)