So, what can I tell you more: Kdenlive is the only Gnome or Plasma application on my system that shows this problem. That’s why I’m here. I haven’t hacked anything (removing Kde related configs from the ~/.config and thus resetting it to Start is not a hack). I’ve been using Kdenlive ever since 18.x (iirc) and never had this problem. I’m just looking for some ideas and just want to leave trace on the Web if somebody out there will ever have the same problem. My hope was that someone says “hey, take a look at /foo/bar/blah.cfg” and remove the line ‘lorem ipsum = true’ and everything will be fine”. But as I have learned it’s not that easy.
This is what I did now: added a new user, copied the AppImage, chown and chmod, started Kdenlive 25.12.1-x86_64.AppImage, splash screen opens, “New Project”, workspace appears, status bar has the ugly font. Conclusion: the problem lies deeper and the cause is not hidden in ~.
I’ve set up a vm installed Xubuntu 24.04, installed Cinnamon, installed Plasma, did some logins there and logins there, changed from lightdm to sddm, logged in here and logged in there: no ugly font, everything’s looking fine. And what I see is: the icons in the status bar are missing, too.
The story continues: I created a new VM with xubuntu-24-04.2, installed it, updated/upgraded it, started it (with xfce4), started the AppImage, everything looks nice. Installed Cinnamon, everything looked nice, installed all fonts and all themes that I have on my real machine, everything looked nice. Thought of Wine, installed wine, added architecture i386, installed win32, started a Windows software with wine, started the AppImage afterwars, everything looked nice. Everything was fine until here.
Then: “apt install ubuntu-desktop mate-desktop-common kubuntu-desktop”. Because of “kubuntu-desktop” sddm was installed, I set it as the default display manager. Rebootet the vm.
Login for a Cinnamon session. Started the AppImage: everything looked fine. Logout.
Login for an Ubuntu (Wayland) session. Started the AppImage: Ugly font. Logout.
Login again for a Cinnamon session. Started the AppImage: still the ugly font.
So, one of the latter is the bad boy. Let’s see what’s going on there, stay tuned…
I don’t know how you can repair things from this current point, but since you setup manually cinnamon it’s going to take a bit of elbow grease to find the solution.
Ubuntu (Wayland) is just the GNOME wayland session. Neither the wayland compositor nor the x11 window manager will have any effect on what happens when running in cinnamon. They are completely isolated from each other. It’s really how you installed cinnamon that bonked it.
May be we are speaking of two different things. But the problems occured first after having started a Ubuntu (Wayland) session (with the Ubuntu desktop) from sddm and having started the AppImage from a terminal. There was no Cinnamon involved at this point. See above. Before the Ubuntu session it was fine (everywhere, in both XFCE and in Cinnamon), during the Ubuntu session it was ugly for the first time. May be it would have been ugly when I would have logged in to Cinnamon for the second time in the upper scenario and really Cinnamon is the bad guy, but may be its the Ubuntu desktop, or Wayland or whatssoever. I’m just trying to reproduce it. And I havereproduced it now. Yeah, I’m now the first and the second person on this planet with this problem.
Just for the record, this is how I installed Cinnamon: sudo apt install cinnamon-desktop
Hang on a second, there’s something I forgot. There is a possibility that GNOME modified the config files such as which font is default when you logged in. This happens when I have both GNOME and KDE installed together and have the setting available for plasma to modify the GTK theme. Logging into KDE will be fine, but then logging into GNOME will have the wrong icons everywhere. This might be it.
Next reproduction in a short sentence: installed xubuntu, rebooted, installed ubuntu-desktop, installed kubuntu-desktop, choose sddm as display manager, rebooted, logged in from sddm into Ubuntu (Wayland) session running Ubuntu desktop. Result: ugly font. No Cinnamon involved.
Shortest reproduction ever: installed xubuntu, rebooted, started AppImage, everything nice, installed kubuntu-desktop (but kept lightdm), rebooted, logged in from lightdm into Xubuntu/XFCE desktop again, started AppImage: ugly font
It’s just the installation of kubuntu-desktop that messes up the font in the Kdenlive AppImage.
This is completely weird, isn’t it. What the …. is going on there…
If you are curious and just want to do what I did:
I would say this is a feature, not a bug. Because installing kde desktop isn’t what caused it, but kde decided to modify the theme config files and I think there is a good probably that the AppImage read the users config file to match the system theme. Just guessing here, since I’m still rather in the dark with what you’re doing despite the attempts to be verbose.
I did a vm snapshot, reset the vm to the point after having installed kubuntu-desktop. This time I logged in to Plasma, started the AppImage: ugly font.
Conclusion: it’s really just the installation of kubuntu-desktop that messes it (but what?) up. And why only for the AppImage and not for deb Version from the respository? Tomorrow is another day…
Sorry, I can’t share this opinion. Even in this mixed DE scenario there are no problems except this really special problem with Kdenlive’s AppImage version (and only with this one). Let’s find out why.
Latest findings: the package that is responsible for the ugly font is kubuntu-settings-desktop
(I installed all the packages “kubuntu-desktop” depends on blockwise one after the other, started the AppImage and checked if anything changed. Repeat. The remaining packages were “kubuntu-desktop” itself and “kubuntu-settings-desktop”. Until these two everything was fine, after having installed kubuntu-settings-desktop the AppImage showed the ugly font and the icons were missing)
And now I’ll try to find out what does “kubuntu-desktop-settings” exactly modify that leads to this problem…
The open question is why this config file only affects the AppImage and not the deb file.
Either if you install Xubuntu or Kubuntu (yes, really!) as the base system: the AppImage get confused by /etc/fonts/conf.avail/56-kubuntu-noto.conf and shows the wrong font (a serif font on Xubuntu and a mono font on Kubuntu). The outdated version installed from the Ubuntu sources with “apt install” look normal both on Xubuntu and Kubuntu. Renaming the 56-kubuntu-noto.conf heals the look of the AppImage both on Xubuntu and Kubuntu.
Logout.
drumroll