Strange fonts appear on the dist-upgrade window

[Scott Wilson]

This morning, 10/12, I began the process of upgrading from 23.04 to 23.10. The process went smoothly, but somewhere along the way the fonts got all weird and I had to "guess" what buttons to click to proceed. I have screenshots.

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 23.10
Package: ubuntu-release-upgrader-core 1:23.10.10
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 6.5.0-9.9-generic 6.5.3
Uname: Linux 6.5.0-9-generic x86_64
NonfreeKernelModules: nvidia_modeset nvidia
ApportVersion: 2.27.0-0ubuntu5
Architecture: amd64
CasperMD5CheckResult: unknown
CrashDB: ubuntu
CrashReports:
 644:1000:1000:0:2023-10-12 09:40:21.097162624 -0400:2023-10-12 09:40:21.097162624 -0400:/var/crash/_usr_bin_alacarte.1000.upload
 600:112:117:5:2023-10-12 12:40:20.686649792 -0400:2023-10-12 09:40:21.149163152 -0400:/var/crash/_usr_bin_alacarte.1000.uploaded
 640:1000:1000:103967:2023-10-12 09:40:21.097162624 -0400:2023-10-12 09:40:17.581127022 -0400:/var/crash/_usr_bin_alacarte.1000.crash
CurrentDesktop: ubuntu:GNOME
Date: Thu Oct 12 14:41:51 2023
InstallationDate: Installed on 2019-12-19 (1393 days ago)
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 18.04.3 LTS "Bionic Beaver" - Release amd64 (20190805)
PackageArchitecture: all
ProcEnviron:
 LANG=en_US.UTF-8
 PATH=(custom, no user)
 SHELL=/bin/bash
 XDG_RUNTIME_DIR=<set>
SourcePackage: ubuntu-release-upgrader
Symptom: dist-upgrade
UpgradeStatus: Upgraded to mantic on 2023-10-12 (0 days ago)
VarLogDistupgradeTermlog:

[Scott Wilson (bswilson)]

Full desktop screenshot, showing the weird fonts issue.

[Scott Wilson (bswilson)]

I failed to elaborate on what exactly I did.

From a standard, Wayland GUI 23.04 Desktop environment, I opened a Terminal windows and entered "sudo update-manager -d" to begin my upgrade then simply attempted to follow the prompts. As I said, I had to make semi-educated guesses when some dialog boxes popped with what I believe were yes/no questions.

[Nick Rosbrook (enr0n)]

This is basically a duplicate of bug 2034986, but the reason the fix doesn't work for you is that you invoke the upgrade directly as root via sudo, which means some environment variables that are needed are not preserved in the upgrade process. Note that the upgrader will invoke the necessary part of the script with root privileges itself (it which point you would be prompted to authenticate), so it's preferred that you just call e.g. `update-manager -d`, not `sudo update-manager -d`.