Upgrade from 13.04 to 13.10 preferences has two of most everything

Question

I upgraded from 13.04 to 13.10 and in Menu > Preferences there are two or more of many items in there. For instance Bluetooth, Displays, Online accounts, power ... I'm using Cinnamon.

How can I remove the duplicated items?

Answer 1

I'm not sure because I don't use Cinnamon, but it's possibly the consequence of having two desktop environments available. Both of them have their .desktop files in /usr/share/applications. You could try modifying the ones you don't want to see.

Let's say you have two of "Bluetooth". My .desktop file for "Bluetooth" looks like this:

[Desktop Entry]
Encoding=UTF-8
Name=Bluetooth Manager
Comment=Blueman Bluetooth Manager
Icon=blueman
Exec=blueman-manager
Terminal=false
Type=Application
StartupNotify=true
Categories=GTK;GNOME;Settings;HardwareSettings;
X-Ubuntu-Gettext-Domain=blueman

(I remove extraneous languages.)

Now, if I don't want to see this particular "Bluetooth" while in Cinnamon and assuming the other DE is Unity, I'd edit the file for the entry I don't want to see while in Cinnamon to look like so:

[Desktop Entry]
Encoding=UTF-8
Name=Bluetooth Manager
Comment=Blueman Bluetooth Manager
Icon=blueman
Exec=blueman-manager
Terminal=false
Type=Application
StartupNotify=true
Categories=GTK;GNOME;Settings;HardwareSettings;
OnlyShowIn=Unity;
X-Ubuntu-Gettext-Domain=blueman

Notice the second-last line which I've added. That ensures that this particular "Bluetooth" will be seen only when you log into a Unity session.

Obviously, you'd take the usual precaution of backing up important files and you know how to sudo edit files. And logging out and logging back in would complete the process.

You can read more about .desktop files here and here.