[SOLVED] Desktop Text Labels Truncated at 4 letters

[cajunjoel]

When I sat down at my machine today, somehow all of the words on the screen and in the main Desktop UI are showing only the first four letters of each word. I've tried changing the font, changing the theme, logging out, rebooting, all to no avail. Image linked below.

This affects the Login page, icons on the Desktop, Terminal, System Settings, Calculator, Evolution Mail, window title bars and some menus, across all users. It does not affect other programs like Firefox, Krita, Signal, or Visual Studio Code.

Generally it was fine last night, and about 18 hours later when I sat down again, it was like this:

https://imgur.com/a/DO2VZqK

from /etc/linuxmint/info

Code: Select all

RELEASE=20
CODENAME=ulyana
EDITION="Cinnamon"
DESKTOP=Gnome
TOOLKIT=GTK
GRUB_TITLE=Linux Mint 20 Cinnamon

Does anyone have a clue how to go about fixing this aside from reinstalling everything (which I argue is not necessary.)

Thanks!!

(I also posted this to /r/linuxmint on Reddit)

[AZgl1800]

you should have Timeshift running in the background.

Have it restore to a date where you know every thing is good.

[rudar]

A similar issue has been solved here: viewtopic.php?t=279498

Good luck!

[JoeFootball]

And similar here: viewtopic.php?f=208&t=346493

[cajunjoel]

Thanks for the other topics. I didn't search on the word "character" like I should have.

That said, here is some info for posterity and my (current) solution. First, the installation history:

/var/log/dpkg.log reveals this (I'm using an older Radeon card)

Code: Select all

2021-04-10 20:29:06 status installed libdrm-radeon1:amd64 2.4.105+git2104091700.991e95~oibaf~f
2021-04-10 20:29:06 status installed libdrm-radeon1:i386 2.4.105+git2104091700.991e95~oibaf~f
2021-04-18 14:00:42 status installed libdrm-radeon1:amd64 2.4.105+git2104141700.67a64b~oibaf~f
2021-04-18 14:00:42 status installed libdrm-radeon1:i386 2.4.105+git2104141700.67a64b~oibaf~f

So I guess on the 18th something got updated and then got installed and went haywire. I see other things installed around that time like xserver-common, xserver-xorg-legacy, xserver-xephyr, xserver-xorg-core but nothing else that stands out as hey, this could affect the user interface!

Digging more in the forums here, I found this old thread: viewtopic.php?t=224526

...which led me to play with the AccelMethod setting in /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/10-radeon.conf. Setting it from the default of EXA to XAA made the difference. I don't know why this changes things, but it did.

From: https://www.x.org/releases/X11R7.7/doc/ ... on.4.xhtml for the values:

Option "AccelMethod" "string"
Chooses between available acceleration architectures. Valid options are XAA and EXA. XAA is the traditional acceleration architecture and support for it is very stable. EXA is a newer acceleration architecture with better performance for the Render and Composite extensions. The default is EXA.

My /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/10-radeon.conf is now:

Code: Select all

Section "OutputClass"
        Identifier "Radeon"
        MatchDriver "radeon"
        Driver "radeon"
        Option "AccelMethod" "XAA"
EndSection

Now everything is back to normal, but I'm sure I'm taking a performance hit for the "Render" and "Composite" extensions, but since I don't know what they are and I'm not gaming on this machine, I don't really care.

[SMG]

Now everything is back to normal, but I'm sure I'm taking a performance hit for the "Render" and "Composite" extensions, but since I don't know what they are and I'm not gaming on this machine, I don't really care.

If you are not gaming why not just use the default mesa that comes with Mint?

[cajunjoel]

If you are not gaming why not just use the default mesa that comes with Mint?

I thought about that, but at this point, it seems like it would be too much fiddling around to change over to it. And really, I don't want to break things.

[SMG]

I thought about that, but at this point, it seems like it would be too much fiddling around to change over to it. And really, I don't want to break things.

Unless you have a Timeshift snapshot of your system before adding the PPA, I'm not sure that you really could change over. Feedback I've received seems to indicate that is a very hard PPA to remove.

I was actually curious as to why you added it in the first place, but now that I re-read what I typed I would interpret the question like you did also.

For those wanting/needing a newer mesa, the kisak PPA seems to preferred over oibaf, but the rule of thumb of taking a snapshot before installing a PPA applies for that one as well.