Thin font, nautilus doesn't integrate with Unity.

[Wiktor: Nizio]

It happens frequently (around 1/2 of the time) that when I boot the computer, font lines are only one pixel thick. This concerns watch in the sys-tray, all item in the menu of all applications, as well as all fonts in Nautilus. When this happens. Nautilus doesn't display menu in the Unity menu bar, but displays an additional button showing three horizontal lines for bringing up the menu.

This problem has been with me for years, although sometimes disappears for months at a time when I run sudo apt-get update. This time it re-emerged after upgrading to 15.10 beta (Wily). It happens usually on power-up, and disappears after system restart. (To appear again on the next power-up).

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 15.10
Package: nautilus 1:3.14.2-0ubuntu12
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 4.2.0-16.19-generic 4.2.3
Uname: Linux 4.2.0-16-generic x86_64
ApportVersion: 2.19.1-0ubuntu2
Architecture: amd64
CurrentDesktop: Unity
Date: Fri Oct 16 04:53:31 2015
GsettingsChanges:

InstallationDate: Installed on 2015-10-08 (7 days ago)
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 15.10 "Wily Werewolf" - Alpha amd64 (20150924)
SourcePackage: nautilus
UpgradeStatus: No upgrade log present (probably fresh install)

[Wiktor: Nizio (zap-4)]

Please see in the screenshot:

1. Thin font in the clock.
2. An extra button (three horizontal lines) for bringing up the Menu in Nautilus.
3. Thin font in Nautilus (filenames).
4. The correct font in System Settings.

EXPECTED:

A. Font in Nautilus should be the same as in System Settings.
B. The Extra button in Nautilus should not be there.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[Silvio Bierman (sbierman)]

I also experience strange font rendering after reinstalling 15.10. I have already been on the development version for months and until yesterday everything looked fine. Yesterday I did a download of the 15.10 release and reinstalled. Everything worked out of the box, even my installed packages, EXCEPT msttcorefonts. I had to explicitly install the ttf-mscorefonts-installer to get fonts like Arial, Courier and Verdana.

But all fonts (not only the ms-ones) are rendered very weird in most if not all places. The look very thin (most fonts are probably one pixels wide) and I really have to go to bold versions to see thicker fonts. Even then, the fonts look garbled.

Changing antialiasing and/or hinting settings has very little influence, if any.

It brings back nightmares of the ugly font rendering I am used to in the Windows I have running in a VirtualBox.

[Silvio Bierman (sbierman)]

I need to correct what I said above. Turning of hinting DOES improve things a lot but it does not work immediately. I did have to restart the system after disabling hinting which made me believe earlier that it did nothing (and then I kept restoring the setting to ON/FULL).

Fonts still look wrong in parts of my Eclipse IDE but that varies with the Eclipse window (package explorer is bad, source editor is good) and some web pages in Chromium show ugly fonts. Overall my desktop looks OK now.

[Silvio Bierman (sbierman)]

An additional remark about the garbled fonts in Eclipse: this happens when I scroll the package-explorer window. This might be a Java related thing since I can not reproduce the behavior outside Eclipse.

[Alberto Salvia Novella (es20490446e)]

@ Adolfo Jayme

Why you set importance as undecided?

[Michael Weimann (m982)]

Can confirm this on the latest 15.10. It disappears when I reboot.

[Wiktor: Nizio (zap-4)]

Recently I had a bad USB hub. The computer had a problem with going past the POST phase and apparently Ubuntu had a problem loading as well. After it did load, the problem in question occurred EACH TIME, and furthermore, mouse cursor would momentarily be replaced with an ugly cross. Apparently the problem may be occurring when Ubuntu cannot properly load due to other hardware failures. Three days after I replaced the USB hub I haven't noticed the problem.

[Michael Weimann (m982)]

I can more or less reliable reproduce the problem when plugging in/off an external display. Rebooting helps. I don't have any other integration problems. Just the font changes to the thin one.

Is there any data I can provide helping to investigate this?

[Wiktor: Nizio (zap-4)]

Not observed in 16.04 in some two weeks of testing.

[Wiktor: Nizio (zap-4)]

I've reproduced it in 16.04, but it is no longer connected to Nautilus. Both the clock and the Unity menu had thin fonts, Nautilus was okay. (The same as comment #10). It happened after I had a power failure.

[Adolfo Jayme Barrientos (fitojb)]

I believe this is connected to gnome-settings-daemon.

[Wiktor: Nizio (zap-4)]

It came back right after 16,04 was released, only this time it is worse:

1. The font is thin in the dash, menu, clock
2. Nautilus doesn't integrate with Unity
3. The left wallpaper is weird, as if it was trying to display two resolutions at the same time
4. There is no wallpaper on the right monitor
5. There are terrible artefacts on the right monitor if I move a window around

This happens around 2/3 of times that I boot.

[Shahbaz Youssefi (shabbyx)]

@Adolfo, that was it! For some reason gnome-settings-daemon was uninstalled on my upgrade to 16.04, and on boot Ubuntu was complaining about an error with it. I installed it, re-logged in and everything is now correct.

[Wiktor: Nizio (zap-4)]

Installing gnome-settings-daemon does not help. The presence of this package does not affect the bug's occurrence:

$ sudo apt install gnome-settings-daemon
[sudo] password for wiktor:
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
gnome-settings-daemon is already the newest version (3.18.2-0ubuntu3).
gnome-settings-daemon set to manually installed.
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.

[Wiktor: Nizio (zap-4)]

I managed to reproduce the problem right after fresh install, with no extra packages. (Not on live USB though). On Kubuntu 16.04 the funny wallpaper briefly appeared during start frow live USB and after installing it on the partition, I could not set up two independent displays at all.

On Mint Rosa 17.03 with KDE I had to reboot after I left two monitors off for the night and kept the system running, but otherwise two monitors have been working out of the box for the last six days.

@Shahbaz, in what ways Ubuntu was complaining? For me it wasn't displaying any error messages with Unity 7, just behaving erratically.

[Merlijn Sebrechts (merlijn-sebrechts)]

I have the same issues as Wiktor explained in commend #2. Fonts look exactly like the screenshot.

As Wiktor said, the problem is possibly related to bad hardware messing up the boot sequence. Everytime I have this problem, something display-related seems to crash right after boot, making the screen flash, and showing the ugly black X cursor for a few seconds. Everytime I have this problem, I see Intel Bluetooth driver issues in dmesg output. No font issues = no bluetooth error messages in dmesg output and vice versa.

[Wiktor: Nizio (zap-4)]

I haven't reproduced it so far in 16.10 developer preview. I agree with Merlijn in comment #19 that when it did happen previously, it was frequently related to some display crash or display refresh whgen system was starting.

[WinEunuchs2Unix (ricklee518)]

I had same problems with Nautilus. Something to do with MS ttf fonts. The solution for me was to open terminal and type:

fc-cache -rv

Then log out and log back in.

[WinEunuchs2Unix (ricklee518)]

Unfortunately the solution in #21 is not permanent and you have to repeat it after reboot. More investigation is needed.

[WinEunuchs2Unix (ricklee518)]

Can confirm now that simply unplugging the USB powered hub and rebooting fixes the Nautilus 1 pixel font problem. Another problem where the built-in display was black and only the TV got wallpaper was also fixed. Plugging the USB hub in after boot did not break Nautilus fonts.

On the hub are:

1) UPS battery status monitor
2) Smartphone
3) Blue tooth ear buds
4) Laser Printer
5) Couple of spare cables

[WinEunuchs2Unix (ricklee518)]

NB This is more than a Nautilus issue because like others the Unity bar is now clearer (before it was hard to read). Conky is now clearer. Google chrome is noticeably clearer and scrolling is smooth when it used to be choppy. The pixel breaks / line cracks when scrolling in Chrome have disappeared. Should this be reclassified as a critical bug with Linux Kernel / systemd as a whole and not just Nautilus? I had just upgraded to Ubuntu 16.04 Kernel 4.4 then 4.6.3 when the Nautilus font became an issue and led me to this thread. But even under Ubuntu 14.04 / Kernel 3.13 there were problems which I'll try to recreate / eliminate with the USB plugged in / not plugged in during boot.

As far as "3) Bluetooth Earbuds" in post #23 we must eliminate that off the list because it's on a Y-Cable with the smartphone and only the smartphone gets data comm + power, whereas the Earbuds are power only.

Watson the game is afoot.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

the bug seems to list different issues, e.g the one from Wiktor seems like a nautilus issue. Those having problems on 16.04 should probably register new bugs than comment on this one

[Alfred Cavigelli (alfredcavigelli)]

I had a freshly installed Ubuntu 16.01.1 with same issues (thin fonts). The issue appeared with auto login only. Now I defined a auto-login-delay of 1 second and it works fine.
To define the delay open the file "/etc/lightdm/lightdm.conf" and edit the line "autologin-user-timeout=1".

$ sudo nano /etc/lightdm/lightdm.conf

autologin-user-timeout=1

[WinEunuchs2Unix (ricklee518)]

That's good to know. I now have Startup Applications loading (which also
causes a delay) and thin fonts haven't appeared in a long time. I thought
they had fixed the bug.

Thank you for the update!

On Mon, Oct 3, 2016 at 10:17 AM, Alfred Cavigelli <
<email address hidden>> wrote:

> I had a freshly installed Ubuntu 16.01.1 with same issues (thin fonts).
> The issue appeared with auto login only. Now I defined a auto-login-delay
> of 1 second and it works fine.
> To define the delay open the file "/etc/lightdm/lightdm.conf" and edit the
> line "autologin-user-timeout=1".
>
> $ sudo nano /etc/lightdm/lightdm.conf
>
> autologin-user-timeout=1
>
> --
> You received this bug notification because you are subscribed to the bug
> report.
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1506704
>
> Title:
> Thin font, nautilus doesn't integrate with Unity.
>
> Status in gnome-settings-daemon package in Ubuntu:
> Confirmed
>
> Bug description:
> It happens frequently (around 1/2 of the time) that when I boot the
> computer, font lines are only one pixel thick. This concerns watch in
> the sys-tray, all item in the menu of all applications, as well as all
> fonts in Nautilus. When this happens. Nautilus doesn't display menu in
> the Unity menu bar, but displays an additional button showing three
> horizontal lines for bringing up the menu.
>
> This problem has been with me for years, although sometimes disappears
> for months at a time when I run sudo apt-get update. This time it re-
> emerged after upgrading to 15.10 beta (Wily). It happens usually on
> power-up, and disappears after system restart. (To appear again on the
> next power-up).
>
> ProblemType: Bug
> DistroRelease: Ubuntu 15.10
> Package: nautilus 1:3.14.2-0ubuntu12
> ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 4.2.0-16.19-generic 4.2.3
> Uname: Linux 4.2.0-16-generic x86_64
> ApportVersion: 2.19.1-0ubuntu2
> Architecture: amd64
> CurrentDesktop: Unity
> Date: Fri Oct 16 04:53:31 2015
> GsettingsChanges:
>
> InstallationDate: Installed on 2015-10-08 (7 days ago)
> InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 15.10 "Wily Werewolf" - Alpha amd64 (20150924)
> SourcePackage: nautilus
> UpgradeStatus: No upgrade log present (probably fresh install)
>
> To manage notifications about this bug go to:
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gnome-settings-
> daemon/+bug/1506704/+subscriptions
>

[Tsvetomir Dimitrov (tdimitrov)]

I have got the same issue with fresh install of 16.04.1, latest updates. On first boot, the fonts are thin.

I have got another workaround. I log out and log in again. Then all the fonts are fine.

[Tsvetomir Dimitrov (tdimitrov)]

Also if I wait a bit (let's say 30 seconds), everything is fine.
This 'workaround' is similar to #26

[Rui Neto (rnetocombr)]

Seems fixed to me with the following steps:

1. Clean install ubuntu 16.04.1
2. sudo apt-get update -y
3. sudo apt-get upgrade -y
4. reboot
5. sudo apt-get dist-upgrade -y
6. reboot
7. sudo apt-get install linux-generic-hwe-16.04-edge
8. reboot

Rebooted about ten times, no error so far.

* OBS: The only font i installed is Microsoft Consolas in home/.fonts/.

[misan (misan)]

It just happened to me after the last system update on 16.04 (I upgraded from 14.04 months ago). I have installed gnome-settings-daemon and rebooted and it went back to normal.

[Shahbaz Youssefi (shabbyx)]

I haven't seen this problem for a long time now. Must be fixed already!