[Solved] Appearance of the desktop environment lost

[envox]

I need help because I don't know what to do any more. I've been working with OpenOffice for years and I've never experienced anything like this: OpenOffice has lost the look of a desktop environment - it now looks like a Windows application running in WINE! This happened on one lauch and after that it can't go back to looking like any other app. The OS is Ubuntu MATE 22.04.2 LTS and I use the latest version of OpenOffice, the problem appeared as early as 4.1.13. For this reason, I tried to uninstall the last version and install something older, e.g. 4.1.10, but that didn't help either. I don't know if this is an OpenOffice or Ubuntu MATE related issue. Anyway, I thank everyone in advance for the assistance and suggestions.

OpenOffice:



About box:



Ubuntu:



Here's how other applications look like (e.g. LibreOffice) and what OpenOffice looked like before the incident:

[Hagar Delest]

Have you tried to reset your OpenOffice user profile?

This discussion may also help: [Solved] Different Behaviour Windows vs. Linux.

Please add [Solved] at the beginning of the title in your first post (top of the topic) with the 🖉 button if your issue has been fixed.

[envox]

Have you tried to reset your OpenOffice user profile?

Yes, I tried but it didn't help. I got the startup wizard, again with wrong appearance:

This discussion may also help: [Solved] Different Behaviour Windows vs. Linux.

If I understood correctly I should try to run AOO from command line with SAL_USE_VCLPLUGIN=gen soffice option?
I didn't understand exactly what to do. I tried openoffice4 SAL_USE_VCLPLUGIN=gen and openoffice4 SAL_USE_VCLPLUGIN=gen soffice but it didn't help.

[Hagar Delest]

Then no idea. Have you tried to change the icon theme in AOO?
Note that without seeing the look before, I don't really see what's wrong with your screenshot. I think that I used to see the same when running AOO on xubuntu before I switched to LO.

[envox]

Then no idea. Have you tried to change the icon theme in AOO?

If you mean this, yes I tried it and it only changes the appearance of the icons:

Note that without seeing the look before, I don't rally see what's wrong with your screenshot. I think that I used to see the same when running AOO on xubuntu before I switched to LO.

I managed to find one screenshot of what it looked like before:



Now it looks like this:

[musikai]

If I understood correctly I should try to run AOO from command line with SAL_USE_VCLPLUGIN=gen soffice option?
I didn't understand exactly what to do. I tried openoffice4 SAL_USE_VCLPLUGIN=gen and openoffice4 SAL_USE_VCLPLUGIN=gen soffice but it didn't help.

Really can't say if this will work.
But what you see is already generic so you might have to try with sthg like "gtk" or "kde" or similar:
SAL_USE_VCLPLUGIN=gtk

[envox]

I tried to set SAL_USE_VCLPLUGIN to: qt5, qt6, kf5, gtk3, gtk4, gtk_kde5, mate ... and no change at all. Crazy stuff!

[musikai]

look if somebody has reported this as bug or has similar experience.
https://bz.apache.org/ooo/

[envox]

look if somebody has reported this as bug or has similar experience.
https://bz.apache.org/ooo/

Thanks, I don't even know what to look for exactly.

It looks like I have to reinstall the complete ubuntu or possibly try to upgrade it to some newer (non-LTS) version, e.g. 23.04 and pray that could probably fix this problem.

[Villeroy]

Open the start script /opt/openoffice4/program/soffice and find the line with export SAL_USE_VCLPLUGIN
Change it from gen to gtk.

Code: Select all

export SAL_USE_VCLPLUGIN=gtk

You may also try to comment out that line and get the right setting from environment variables.

Do you know that LibreOffice is the "better OpenOffice" since many years? For good reasons, Linux distributions install LibreOffice instead of OpenOffice.

[envox]

Thanks for the suggestion. Unfortunately, I can't find anywhere in the soffice script that SAL_USE_VCLPLUGIN is used. I also tried to define that variable in that file, but it didn't help.

By the way, I still use AOO because some things (surprisingly) work better than in LO. I also still use an extension that supports AOO better than LO.

[Hagar Delest]

I think that there is a problem with AOO that falls back to the generic (gen) VCL whatever it is told.
Maybe it's a compatibility issue with the desktop theme you have chosen. Have you tried to change it?
I have not found any bug report about that, you may try to file one or to ask the dev mailing list.

[Bill]

The package which AOO needs to render the UI properly has been deprecated and is no longer being installed by default. On Ubuntu MATE 22.04 I had to install the libgdk-pixbuf-xlib-2.0-0 package. See also:

[SOLVED] OpenOffice stuck on Raleigh theme and can't change

[envox]

Bingo! Thank you @Bill so much for this. That fixed my problem and I have the correct appearance again:



So, the following had to be done:

Code: Select all

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get -y install libgdk-pixbuf2.0-0

[musikai]

Cool!

Fun thing is that with LibreOffice and their theme support on LInux they introduced a sizing bug in the rendering of custom macro dialogs. (For which I found a ridiculous workaround to get them appear correctly again)
This bug didn't affect OpenOffice because it showed in generic style.
With your OpenOffice can you test the attachment from comment 12 from here
https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/sho ... 154745#c12
and tell me how the left dialog looks on your OpenOffice now? Are the smaller fields looking correctly (is their height the same as the vertical comparison line? ) or do they only look correctly on the right dialog?
I am asking because I want to know if this is a LibreOffice thing only.

[envox]

I don't know if I understood correctly, but you wanted to see how it looks when I open the doc from the attachment in comment #12? I see no difference between AOO and LO.

This is how it looks in AOO:



... and LO:

[musikai]

Almost. Can you click the left or right button. (You might have to allow execution of macros in Extras->Options->Security->Macro Security)
This starts a dialogue where I can see if the textfields are the correct size. I would suppose that OpenOffice will show correctly and LibreOffice (if 7.xx) wrong.

Here are the dialogs in LibreOffice 7.3 in LinuxMint21 (in VirtualBox). You see that the height of the textboxes is greater than the little lines in the center. But they should be the same. (There is a little button in the dialogs called "fix Size" that can make it happen for the dialog invoked by the "right" button.)
---
Left button:

LinuxMint_LO7.3_Left.PNG (19.02 KiB) Viewed 14551 times

---
OpenOffice 4.1.13 shows this test correctly in LinuxMint21 (in VirtualBox)

LinuxMint_OO4.1.13_Left.PNG (15.55 KiB) Viewed 14551 times

---
Would be interested if your OO with the theme trick looks the same.

[envox]

In all cases this is shown to me (so even without clicking on the "Fix sizes" button):

[musikai]

Thank you very much for taking the time!!!
You say "in all cases". Interesting that also LibreOffice seems to work, can you tell me the version?

[envox]

In all cases, I mean both "Macro Dialogue" buttons with and without clicking the "Fix sizes" button. I am using the latest version of AOO 4.1.14.

[musikai]

envox, thank you very much for taking your time. So at least we can see that there is at least one area where AOO still behaves as expected and LO needs a workaround for a newly introduced bug.