Upgrading to 16.10 broke GTK UI no separators and flat look

[Matt Kowske]

Upgrading from 16.04 LTS to 16.10 drastically changed the look of certain elements of the UI. I think it may be isolated to GTK applications but I don't know for sure. There is a question in stackoverflow about this too (not posted by me):

http://askubuntu.com/questions/859291/separators-gone-and-spacing-messed-up-after-updating-to-ubuntu-16-10

I'm also having a problem with at QT5 application now as well (Nixnote) that crashes immediately on startup. If I use the QT4 version of this application it works fine. I don't know if this is related to the bug I am reporting but am including it for completeness.

A screenshot is attached.

[Ubuntu Foundations Team Bug Bot (crichton)]

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[Matt Kowske (jmkowske)]

I wanted to add that I experience no matter if I am using Unity or KDE or any other WM.

[Matt Kowske (jmkowske)]

I'm not sure if this constitutes a fix or not, but I was able to get GTK applications looking normal again by going into System Settings and changing the theme to Adwaita or Ambience. I don't think there was any theme set (or a different theme not listed)... and it wasn't easy to select a theme since separators were gone and clicking in the right area was more of a guess. Eventually I got it selected though and everything looked correct again.

When using something like gnome-tweak-tool or lxappearance I have 10 or so GTK themes, but in System Settings->Apperance there are only 4 listed. The themes that are not listed here (ones I have installed myself) don't seem to work at all. If I select Arc or Breeze in gnome-tweak-tool the appearance goes back to looking broken. So it seems like its a problem with some themes and being incompatible with 16.10?

For non-Unity DEs I have added /usr/bin/gnome-settings-daemon to the startup process and that seems to have restored the GTK applications there.