Odd Changes After Latest Update

Thaeris

Hooray! Griping!

I perform updates when I'm about to make moves on this or that - if everything's going well, why bother otherwise? Well, as I finally gear up for installing Solus on another machine, I figured it was time to get everything up to speed. Most things seem fine, but there are some oddities that strike me as strange:

The most concerning item is at startup and shutdown. I get two lines on the initial start (drive decryption) screen which state something along the lines of "configuration devices / filter not found." The lines are in a light grey and do not last very long on screen. To read them properly I'd need to get a photograph. The same warnings appear at shut-down. Again, it's very fast, and even seeing what message is what is a bit challenging.

That said, if some handy technical chap or chapess can direct me to provide this or that sort of output to diagnose this problem, and perhaps lead me to a fix, I'd appreciate it!

A less concerning item is one of aesthetics. It seems the file explorer has been tweaked just a bit, and it's a bit annoying from a visual perspective:

...What's with the bubbles? It clips into the directory path, etc. Is there a way to revert to the previous style in the file explorer? It's not that important for function, but I don't care for the change.

Anyhow, I hope things have been well with everyone. It is, however, odd to jump into a new update and have things just shift on you, even if seemingly minor. Looking forward to your advice. 🙂

Harvey

Thaeris "configuration devices / filter not found."

I remember looking into it and there was a patch / update that suppresses the warning but that was all it did. You can ignore it.

Thaeris ...What's with the bubbles?

That might be a theming issue. The old theme is basically abandoned and does not work properly anymore. Materia does not seem to have this issue. But maybe someone more familiar with gtk stuff can confirm.

Edit
Additionally none of these are new, so you haven't updated in months or only just noticed it. If you have gone months without updating it is not a great idea, security updates get pushed all the time.

Staudey

Harvey That might be a theming issue. The old theme is basically abandoned and does not work properly anymore. Materia does not seem to have this issue. But maybe someone more familiar with gtk stuff can confirm.

Yup, the Plata theme is abandoned, unfortunately. The current suggestion (and new default) is Materia(-Dark). There has been some effort made towards reviving Plata, but nothing complete yet.

(P.S. Also edited the original post so it actually shows the screenshot 😉 )

Thaeris The most concerning item is at startup and shutdown. I get two lines on the initial start (drive decryption) screen which state something along the lines of "configuration devices / filter not found."

As Harvey said, that's just a harmless warning, and there is a patch waiting to be merged that gets rid of it:
https://dev.getsol.us/D13250

Thaeris

Thank you, my dudes!

Harvey , indeed, I am not a habitual updater, for better and for worse. I'm sorry to hear about the theming. Fixing something like that is way beyond my pay grade, so I do hope there is something done about this at some point (we all miss Josh, do we not?). Not a deal breaker, but it was one of those things that gave Solus its good character. Wasn't there an optional menu bar that dropped down from the top of the file explorer as well, etc? Questions like that are what you get for not paying enough attention to seemingly minor things; it's what happens when everything is working the way it's supposed to! Also, thank you for the heads up on the theming change - just another thing for me to sink some time into a some point, unfortunately.

Staudey , thank you for fixing the screenshot. Not sure what went wrong with that on my end...

Furthermore, how does one go about dealing with patches like that? I'm generally content with the software center, so if there's a terminal-based patch for this... I've not attempted anything like that since installing Linux in the first place!

infinitymdm

Thaeris As far as theming goes, your best option right now is probably to switch to Materia theme as mentioned above. I've been working on a successor to the Plata theme for a bit, but it's definitely not ready for prime time yet.

The patch Staudey mentioned will be released in an update. You don't need to do anything special to apply it, just update like normal once it comes out.

Thaeris

I was just thinking about this: since I am a bit of a Luddite, I've not tried updating the theming just yet. The odd changes really are easy to overlook, but then I noticed something if you still have Plata Noir as the active theme:

Contrast the main file explorer GUI screens versus the "save" or "save as" screens. You'll note the old interface is still intact in those locations.

...If someone is interested in fixing the old theme, it seems that part of the interface which is noticeably damaged is still working the way it's supposed to in other areas. I don't know anything about making the GUI do GUI stuff beyond using it, but perhaps that's useful information to someone.

As per why I'm using the old theme still (beyond being obstinate), I will note that I tried some of the other built-in options. Some still had the dark theme, but then the backing of the file explorer turned blindingly bright, etc. I prefer not straining my eyes, you know. I assume there's things to do which fix such issues, but as noted before, projects!

infinitymdm

Thaeris If someone is interested in fixing the old theme, it seems that part of the interface which is noticeably damaged is still working the way it's supposed to in other areas

I've been working on Platano, a replacement for Plata, for a while now. However, this is my first time working on theming, and there's a lot I still have to learn. It will probably be a while still before it's ready.