Snap application have very bad font rendering in Ubuntu 21.10

I know Ubuntu 21.10 is not out yet, hence me posting this issue to to make people ware of it. I have been running Ubuntu 21.10 for a few weeks now, and everything (in my usage) seems to be working out well. Only glaring issue I am seeing is fonts in Snap application are not rendered properly. And they are defaulting the old black bar Yaru theme. I have attached a few images to support my finding.


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AFAIK that’s because Impish doesn’t have the mixed theme and the default, all-light theme is just called “Yaru”. The GTK theme snap hasn’t been updated, so “Yaru” is still the mixed theme. You could run snap apps with “Yaru-light” to get them to match for now.

Yes I was aware of the theming part, but not sure the fond rendering. Are those two related?

I haven’t noticed any change in font rendering myself.

@jamesh I had a look at libreoffice and it has

  desktop:
    mount-host-font-cache: false

so I’m not sure how snapd can be involved here as I thought with that attribute we vanquished the last point where snapd can mess things up with fonts, do you think a launchpad bug against a distro pkg would be better place to get eyes on this issue? Or is there still something else that snapd could be doing? Or maybe even a bug in the desktop extension?

I’ve noticed this too with the Libreoffice snap and unsure what to do about it… I’ve filed a bug on the Libreoffice snap github to track this issue for at least Libreoffice but it sounds like it might be a broader issue since it affects the snap store too…

At least for the Libreoffice case, I can confirm this is a wayland only and impish only problem, the fonts look normal with xorg.

2 Likes

same for me as you can see on the ubuntu-software

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Did you update to 21.10 from an old installation? Then you’re probably on track latest/stable, not on latest/stable/ubuntu-21.10, which carries the fix.

For snap-store I have

channels:
  latest/stable:    3.38.0-64-g23c4c77     2021-06-15 (547) 53MB -
  latest/candidate: 3.31.1+git189.991d1d1d 2021-04-20 (539) 45MB -
  latest/beta:      3.38.0-66-gbd5b8f7     2021-10-06 (557) 56MB -
  latest/edge:      40.0-341-gb49ac9c      2021-09-20 (549) 48MB -
installed:          3.38.0-64-g23c4c77                (547) 53MB -

When I change to latest/stable/ubuntu-21.10 I still get the same version as latest/stable. When I change to latest/edge I works fine but i guess it’s quite unstable ? my others snaps :

Name                 Version             Rev    Tracking         Publisher   Notes
bare                 1.0                 5      latest/stable    canonicalâś“  base
canonical-livepatch  9.8.0               114    latest/stable    canonicalâś“  -
core                 16-2.52.1           11993  latest/stable    canonicalâś“  core
core18               20210722            2128   latest/stable    canonicalâś“  base
core20               20210928            1169   latest/stable    canonicalâś“  base
firefox              93.0-1              631    latest/stable/…  mozilla✓    -
gnome-3-34-1804      0+git.3556cb3       72     latest/stable    canonicalâś“  -
gnome-3-38-2004      0+git.6ba6040       76     latest/stable    canonicalâś“  -
gtk-common-themes    0.1-59-g7bca6ae     1519   latest/stable    canonicalâś“  -
lxd                  4.0.7               21545  4.0/stable/…     canonical✓  -
snap-store           3.38.0-64-g23c4c77  547    latest/stable    canonicalâś“  -
snapd                2.52.1              13640  latest/stable    canonicalâś“  snapd

Interesting, I have

tracking:     latest/stable/ubuntu-21.10
refresh-date: yesterday at 10:17 CEST
channels:
  latest/stable:    3.38.0-64-g23c4c77     2021-06-15 (547) 53MB -
  latest/candidate: 3.31.1+git189.991d1d1d 2021-04-20 (539) 45MB -
  latest/beta:      3.38.0-66-gbd5b8f7     2021-10-06 (557) 56MB -
  latest/edge:      40.0-341-gb49ac9c      2021-09-20 (549) 48MB -
installed:          3.38.0-66-gbd5b8f7                (557) 56MB -

Rev 557 instead of 547.