On Fri, 20 Jan 2017, Paul A. Rubin wrote:
Classes are organized by category, with categories listed alphabetically, and the original-accept-no-substitutes Beamer class is in the Presentations category, rather late in the list.
Paul, That's the class I selected. Didn't look higher in the list for anything else as I was scrolling up from the default KOMA-report class.
It's been this way for a while, and across all systems as far as I know (so no fluke). My usual approach is either to open the menu, scroll like crazy and then look for Beamer or to do File > New from Template..., pick the "beamer-conference-ornate-20min.lyx" template (thank goodness I can just click on it and don't have to type it), and then delete or overwrite stuff.
I saw the ...-ornate-20min.lyx series (English, French, Japanese) and ignored them.
You might want to consider the following: take an old Beamer presentation with any customization you typically use, strip out the details, and save it in ~/.lyx/templates. To start a new presentation, use File > New from Template..., navigate to ~/.lyx/templates (a bit of a PITA) and open your template. Fill stuff in and save as some other file.
I've not saved one as a template, but this is what I've been doing since I switched from writing Beamer presentations by hand in emacs to using lyx. Makes no difference to me to keep doing this but I was surprised that opening a new doc and changing the class to Beamer did not set the correct environments. Carpe weekend, Rich
