Applets are very dark
Submitted by Magnus Bergman
Assigned to Simon Steinbeiß @ochosi
Description
Created attachment 9167 My panel with the applets systray, multiload, datetime and actions.
Since version 4.14 all applets based on GTK+ 3 are very dark or completely black. Applets based on GTK+ 2 (such as multiload-nandhp) are displayed correctly. Changing the background makes no difference. I suspect this relates to compositing which I don't use (since the window manager, Notion, that I'm using doesn't support it).
Attachment 9167, "My panel with the applets systray, multiload, datetime and actions.":
Version: 4.14.0
Activity
I was using a theme I made myself (and if someone can come up with a way to fix this in the theme I think it would be an acceptable solution I think). This is how it looks with Adwaita (the gray color around the panel comes from the theme of the window manager). Very similar but with a greenish tint, which might be some kind of clue?
I might also add that this happens on all three computers I've tried it on so far (using Intel and Nvidia graphics), so it's likely not graphics driver related. It's also not identical every time. On one computer it was very dark the first login after the update of xfce4-panel (similar to the screenshot or perhaps not quite as dark), but after a reboot the applets were completely black. On another computer they have (so far) only been completely black.
Attachment 9173, "The same problem with Adwaita":
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I have the same problem. It's been like that for a while, though it got worse recently. "worse" meaning the notification panel is also black now. Previously, it was just a few of the other applets.
I don't have a gtk.css file in ~/.config/gtk-3.0. I tried Adwaita, and that didn't help. I also don't use compositing.
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*** Bug 16120 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
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I'm using Gentoo. I had a few lines in gtk.css (to make the undershoot of scrolled windows transparent since it caused a bug some years ago). After removing this file the panel looks perfect!
But now to the strange part. I upgraded xfce on a forth computer. And on that computer this problem didn't show up. Yet it has the same fix in gtk.css. So I tried to reinstate gtk.css on the first computer to see if it was the cause of the problem. The panel still looks perfect, so apparently not. I can't think of a single thing that might have changed since it got working.
Now there are two computers left where the problem has been seen (which I don't have access to right now). I will check if I still can recreate the problem on them, and in that case check if the problem also occurs with other non-composing window managers. (Also I'm not confident that the problem is gone for good since it's been a bit random all along.)
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I found the key to the problem! (I wouldn't say solution as it doesn't fully explain all observations.) The darkness of the applets depends on the setting "leave-opacity". Setting this to 100 using xfce4-settings-editor (or not having it at all) and restarting the panel makes the applets always render correctly, as far as I can tell. But perhaps it doesn't fully solve the problem since something might cause this value to change. Maybe a new value is written to the config if the current one is invalid (which could explain why the appearance changed after a reboot)?
Anyway, it seems like version 3 of GTK (unlike version 2) supports opacity to some degree without compositing. So perhaps the opacity sliders should be enabled even then compositing isn't used, if it makes sense to implement old school transparency by grabbing the background? (But don't bother for my sake. I guess everyone who wants transparency uses a compositing window manager anyway.) Otherwise the setting should be completely ignored and perhaps the sliders could even be hidden (showing them disabled isn't very useful IMHO).
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@ochosisaid:The opacity sliders are still shown because there is an infobar informing the user of why opacity/transparency is not available incl a link to the dialog for enabling compositing. The settings itself for enter/leave opacity are ignored - even if changed through xfconf-query or xfce4-settings-editor. At least I couldn't reproduce it and am not sure how I would be able to...
Please let me know which steps to follow to get to the state you're currently in (if possible).
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The problem can be reproduced like this:
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Use a window manager without compositing (I've tested notion and twm).
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Set "leave-opacity" to, say, 1.
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Restart xfce4-panel.
Just to confirm I made a fresh install of Xubuntu 19 in VirtualBox and was able to reproduce it there too. However fewer applets seems to be affected. But at least the action buttons with appearance set to buttons are. (Note that the twm package provided by Ubuntu is buggy and doesn't run out of the box, setting LANG=C will work around the bug.)
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For some reason I never thought of testing it with xfwm4. When doing so and turning off compositing I actually can reproduce the problem (still with the same fresh install of Xubuntu 19 in VirtualBox). Turning compositing on makes the problem go away, turning it off again and then restarting the panel makes it come back.
changed milestone to %4.15.2
added 5. Background Color / Image 5. Visual Appearance labels
