Snapped app not loading fonts on Fedora (and Arch)

Thanks, but is core20 still in beta or is it stable by now? :blush:

Core20 as a base has been stable for a few months, and Ubuntu Core 20 the OS has been released a few weeks ago, the GTK3 extensions are still experimental, but then itā€™s a GTK2 app anyway :).

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Thanks, Iā€™ll try it then :blush:

Iā€™ve tweaked the mount namespace of the snap and mounted a clean tmpfs over /var/cache/fontconfig.

Would you mind explaining how to do alter snap mounts for an application?

This solved my issue, I am using Fedora

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Hi all. I am really at the end of my wisdom and about to give up on snaps. Canā€™t get many of the snaps I use to work on either Fedora or Manjaro (Arch). The system dialog windows will produce squares instead of fonts.

Issue observed with: All Whatsapp clients from snap store/ Bluemail / Telegram

I have tried all fixes I have found on the internet but nothing works:

  • deleting font caches in var or common or current
  • rebuilding font caches
  • forcing snap to ignore user font caches
  • installing fonts-noto-color-emoji and fonts-dejavu*
  • even tried to start a shell for the apps and clear the font cache there but it couldnā€™t find that command

This doesnā€™t help resolve the misconception that Snap is an Ubuntu thing. Is it time to give up or could there be other fixes I havenā€™t tried?

Iā€™m on Arch. Telegram and Spotify work just fine. I just installed bluemail, and the sing in window also appears to be rendered correctly. Itā€™s a fairly default setup with GNOME desktop.

Which system dialogs produce squares?

Thanks for the quick reply. When you try to print out an email in Bluemail, you will notice the issue. Similarly, if you attempt to save a picture from a Whatsapp client on the machine you also get scrambled fonts.

I donā€™t trust Bluemail to give it access to my email account, so canā€™t comment on this. However, Iā€™ve installed Opera and the fonts are ok, even in native open file and print dialogs. Perhaps those are operating through desktop portals. Can you double check that xdg-desktop-portal, xdg-desktop-portal-gtk are installed? If you use gnome you should also install xdg-desktop-portal-gnome.

Hi there, I checked it and all of them are installed. The problem is also there when I try to save any attachment, the dialogs are unreadable. I would like to add that I uninstalled the snap version, I downloaded the rpm version from the Bluemail website and it worked. I am back at the snap version because I really prefer itā€¦any idea of how to fix the fonts issue? (none of the previous solutions worked for me at fedora 35)

I am having the same problems on Fedora (which is my main distro) and I have basically given up on Snaps for now. Iā€™ve spent days after days trying every workaround I could find on the internet. Now I donā€™t want to keep playing the lotto to see which Snaps will have corrupted fonts and which donĀ“t.

There is obviously something different on an Ubuntu base that prevents this from happening. And probably Fedora devs are in no hurry to make it work.

Is there any answer to this Issue? Iā€™ve been using snaps in Ubuntu for years, and after I give Fedora a try, this issue started happening on VSCodium snap on a fresh install. I tried the workarounds of deleting cache and rebuilding but no success.

I tried to create a fresh VM of Fedora 35, installed only snapd and the codium snap, and the problem happens, so probably not an error on my configuration and system.

Is there anything to do or should I give up on codium snap for now?

Thanks!

Upgrade to Fedora 36. That fixed the problem for me.

Iā€™m on Ubuntu 22.04. Install the snap Leafpad causes this problem immediately. Other snaps are fine.

Kubuntu-22.04

Debreate with Python2.7 and wxPythonGTK3 having same annoying issue.

Used Core-20, downgraded to Core-18, deleted Cache files, etc.

Ubuntu Snap is a joke. 12GB and canā€™t get a simple GUI app to run.

Iā€™m better off by just installing Kubuntu-20.04 and Chroot into it. -__-*

Just commenting to say that I am still experiencing this issue on Arch Linux (using KDE on both Wayland and Xorg).

I tried deleting the font cache as mentioned in previous posts, but the problem still exists for Gitkraken and Termius (which also seems to have AppArmor issues, but that is a separate matter).

Still happening on Ubuntu Lunar (23.04) with apps such as Bitwarden (e.g. in 2FA menu) or in Postman in some dialogs

So, this issue is still occurring; Iā€™ve had exactly the same bug filed against the same package in the last two weeks. (https://github.com/stuartlangridge/ColourPicker/issues/90) Since this issue came up first four years ago, is there anything I can do as package author to work around this problem? Thereā€™s a lot of discussion above about fontconfig issues and so on, and itā€™s obviously very hard to fix at a global snapcraft level (I certainly donā€™t understand how to fix any of the issues outlined), but since itā€™s seriously impeding peopleā€™s use of my software, is there anything I can do to fix it for my package somehow? If there isnā€™t, then maybe the best thing to do is to pull the snap and direct people elsewhere for now until a global fix can be implemented. That seems pushy, which itā€™s not intended to; I would just rather not deliver software to people that they canā€™t use and where I canā€™t do anything about that other than to suggest they uninstall. So, if thereā€™s some sort of package-specific workaround I can implement, Iā€™m happy to look at it.

@sil this shouldnā€™t be an issue with the newer content/platform snaps as weā€™ve isolated fontconfig to ensure caches arenā€™t mixed with the host environment. Iā€™d recommend updating your snap to use the gnome extension which takes advantage of the gnome-42-2204 platform.

Aha, nice. Iā€™ll give that a try and hopefully itā€™ll fix it. (The problem doesnā€™t happen to me, but I should be able to ask the affected users and report back.)