unity-control-center icons missing when using xsession desktop with awesome window manager

Question

I'm running Ubuntu 16.10 on amd64. I'm using xsession ("User Defined Session") as my desktop, so that everything is started from my ~/.xsession script. This script starts the awesome window manager and various other programs, including unity-settings-daemon.

I would like to use the unity-control-center ("System Settings") application to set various settings. Under 16.04 this worked fine. After upgrading to 16.10, most of the icons are missing from the control center.

It seems that this is due to the fact that the files in /usr/share/applications/unity-*-panel.desktop have the line OnlyShowIn=Unity;. If I comment out this line from, say, /usr/share/applications/unity-datetime-panel.desktop, then the "Date and Time" icon appears when I run unity-control-center. But this is not a very good solution since, as far as I can tell, it will be reverted whenever the unity-control-center package is upgraded.

Is there a better way to be able to use all the control center panels in my setup?

Answer 1

According to https://specifications.freedesktop.org/desktop-entry-spec/latest/ar01s05.html, the OnlyShowIn key is matched against the value of the XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP environment variable. So we can trick unity-control-center into showing all the panels by running

env XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP=Unity unity-control-center

This seems to work fine.

Under Ubuntu 17.04 and above, Unity should be changed to Unity7.