Evince has a totally invisible gui with the snap theme

[nicocarbone]

Since changing from the ppa to the snap, evince has a transparent GUI, as seen in the screenshot.
Also, when starting evince from the terminal, I get a permission denied error:

Theme parsing error: gtk.css:1:0: Failed to import: Error al abrir el archivo /snap/communitheme/current/share/themes/Communitheme/gtk-3.0/gtk.css: Permiso denegado

[Feichtmeier]

Oh god he is right @.@

[frenchy82]

Hi, i have the same problem with gnome-calculator installed from snap.
Gui is invisible.

[minghuaw]

Same issue here, and apparently many gnome default applications such as printing, system monitor are also affected. Totally transparent window frame. Was this issue ever present in the ppa installations?

[Feichtmeier]

Can't confirm the issue on system monitor.
Would be good if we somehow try to debug until we limited the possibilites.

Could you guys check if those applications are a snap?
I only have this issue on evince and it's from the regular repo installation

[frenchy82]

I have the problem with evince too, and it's an apt installation
same problem with logs and characters but it's a snap

and there is no problem with gnome-calculator if it's installed by apt

[minghuaw]

Looks like there will be permission issues with default snap install, as it will install the package into a sandbox. Somehow snap refresh communitheme --classic or snap refresh communitheme --edge (tried both at the same time, so not sure which one worked) will allow evince to have a GUI that's in a different theme.

UPDATE: never mind, seems like what i did actually got communitheme removed, and everything starts to show in a different GUI theme

Another UPDATE:
removed the communitheme snap and reinstalled with --classic option. restart and somehow evince has a complete GUI that is in communitheme; BTW, my evince is a snap installation not apt.

However, this issue is still present with my system monitor

[didrocks]

So, there are 2 things here:

• evince, which is protected by apparmor, isn't allowed to read the theme snap dir. Needs fixing.
• the other mentioned are snap, I'll talk to the snapd theme to try adding the communitheme snap dir to allowed directories for the desktop interface.

[didrocks]

For evince (and other deb applications protected by apparmor), the fix is submitted as https://salsa.debian.org/apparmor-team/apparmor/merge_requests/5.

Snap will need a little bit of discussions (later today)

[didrocks]

Posted a patch + discussion for snaps on https://forum.snapcraft.io/t/snap-using-themes-in-other-snaps/4946

[nicocarbone]

Some of my snap apps (calculator, for example) appears invisible. But others (KeePassXX, for example) appears with a different theme (adwaita, I think). Do you why the difference? Can both problems be resolved by the same patch?

[didrocks]

The ones that don't appear transparently but with adwaita are buggy (ironic, isn't it? ;)). They need to use the gsettings plug and snapcraft-desktop-helper parts to read what current theme is set in the session.

[nicocarbone]

Ok, I think I get the idea.
Is there a way of setting a "fall-back" theme in the snaps? If not, what will happen with third-party themes and snap apps?

[alculete]

My libreoffice.snap has the same issue but instead of invisible background I get black background with icons almost translucent and some above others

[didrocks]

@nicocarbone: that's a question for the snapd team itself. I think they won't be supported until snapd treats theme in a special way. I encourage you to bring those use cases to https://forum.snapcraft.io/ to discuss with them (the communitheme one won't be an issue soon as we'll ship this big snap, but for other cases, that will still be an issue)

[nicocarbone]

Any ETA with the evice/apparmor bug? I understand that snap theming may take a while longer, but the apparmor fix seems straightforward.

[nicocarbone]

Another question, sorry if this is too off-topic: is there any plan to create a flatpack for the theme? I understand that flatpack may not be officially supported, but given that flathub already has an interface in place for themes, it may be worth the effort.

[didrocks]

I pinged the apparmor (debian and ubuntu) maintainer again today for my fix. I can't give an ETA for him though :p
You can applied the fix locally and regenerate the apparmor profile manually in between.

On the flatpak question, no plan from me (I won't really have time for this), but anyone who wants to flatpak the theme and push it to flathub are welcome to work on this, ofc.

[nicocarbone]

The fix living in the proposed channel works fine. Thanks! :)

[didrocks]

and it's now released (for the evince part). The snap part will come once the new snaps using GNOME 3.28 for 18.04 using my gtk-common-theme snap is release.

[didrocks]

As the evince part is closed and a more precise duplicate is opened, I'm now closing this one.

[octopus-prime]

Any progress here? Calculator is still transparent.

[Feichtmeier]

@octopus-prime yes you need to install
sudo snap install gtk-common-themes
Then reboot to be sure

[octopus-prime]

sudo snap install gtk-common-themes
->
snap "gtk-common-themes" is already installed, see 'snap help refresh'

[Feichtmeier]

Reboot?

[Feichtmeier]

It's fixed. Check the other thread

[octopus-prime]

Works now. Thank you!

[cassmtnr]

@Feichtmeier which other thread? I went in the both that is referring this issue and it didn't worked.

[cassmtnr]

Solved by:
sudo snap remove gnome-calculator
sudo apt install gnome-calculator
sudo snap remove gnome-system-monitor
sudo apt install gnome-system-monitor