Moolticute theme not working right on Linux Mint?

[ghost]

Expected behavior

I was expecting the theme to look all white and black text with good contrast like shown here: https://www.tindie.com/products/stephanelec/mooltipass-mini-ble-authenticator/

Actual behavior

The text is gray instead of black in many areas of Moolticute and is barely readable, for example I have to hover over the text of the items I want to tick to read properly in the device settings.

Step by step guide to reproduce the problem

I've simply Installed Moolticute using the instructions of https://www.themooltipass.com/setup/ for Debian and opened it afterwards to see it look like I've mentioned, not quite right contrast and quite unreadable text.

Moolticute Version

The version of Moolticute I've installed is 1.01.0.r0.g77100ea-23.1 as shown by Synaptic Package Manager

Operating System

The operative system I am using is Linux Mint Debian edition (LMDE) https://www.linuxmint.com/download_lmde.php

Mooltipass Device

I am using the Mooltipass Mini BLE connected through USB directly to the computer

[limpkin]

picture showing the issue:

@ghubsergi is your desktop manager set in dark mode? :)

[ghost]

@limpkin yes, I think you mean my desktop environment theme?, it's set to Mint-Y-dark.

The problem seems to go away if I switch to a light theme, but as you can imagine, I'd like to not give up the dark theme so that Moolticute looks properly...

[limpkin]

right. @bobsaintcool could you remind me how we're releasing for mint?

[bobsaintcool]

It does not ring a bell to me. Without knowing that much on Mint it seems that it is not packaged http://packages.linuxmint.com/search.php?release=any&section=any&keyword=moolticute

As Mint seems to be an Ubuntu base maybe @ghubsergi used the Ubuntu or Debian (if it exist) package. Or maybe it has been build manually.

@ghubsergi can you confirm how did you install Moolticute on Mint please?

@limpkin do you believe the issue could be related to a package issue? I saw few comment on forum where some dark theme does not work well with Qt maybe it could be the case for Mint-Y-Dark

[ghost]

@bobsaintcool I installed Moolticute using the setup Debian guide from themooltipass.com website.

[limpkin]

would it theoretically be possible to release some ubuntu version for qt5 and some for qt6?

[bobsaintcool]

I cannot speak directly with qt as this is an outside world for me. However I believe it is technically possible to do different package that each use different major version of a core library (eg qt for us). I'll say the biggest requirement to make it succesfull is that both major version are built-in into the package of the distribution.

For Ubuntu you might have something like that:

• 1 real package for qt5 moolticute-qt5
• 1 real package for qt6 moolticute-qt6
• 1 virtual package that will reference the qt version you like the most eg moolticute-qt6

However, even if this will be doable, it might be a pain for you to collect the environment information that will be needed when someone cut you an issue on github. I will highly suggest to think about what will be the user experience in such case. Maybe it could be a new button in the interface that will create a github issue with the information about the qt used

[limpkin]

@raoulh could you give us your opinion on this matter? I'm guessing that Xenial that we're building for (https://github.com/mooltipass/moolticute/blob/master/scripts/ci/linux/after_success.sh) doesn't handle qt6... could we therefore package differently depending on the OS?

[bobsaintcool]

He state that he was running the following flavor of Linux Mint:

lsb_release -a gives me ; 

Distributor ID: Linuxmint
Description:    LMDE 5 (elsie)
Release:    5
Codename:   elsie

And that he used the installation step from https://www.themooltipass.com/setup/ which lead to something hosted on opensuse https://software.opensuse.org/download.html?project=home%3Afawz%3Amooltipass&package=moolticute probably by someone fawz

Maybe the https://github.com/mooltipass/moolticute/blob/master/scripts/ci/linux/after_success.sh is not the good place to look at first

[limpkin]

ohhhh thank you @bobsaintcool !!!! then it's @barathrm we need to ping :)

[barathrm]

Hia!

The dark theme has always been broken for me on openSUSE with KDE as well, I've never had time to dig into why.

@ghubsergi which version of debian did you select when installing from OBS? OBS builds for debian testing, 10 and 11. According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_Mint#Releases linux mint elsie corresponds to debian 11.

As for the qt5 vs qt6, I have no idea. I'm pretty sure you can't interchangeably compile with qt5 vs qt6, though. I have both qt5 and qt6 installed on my system and moolticute is linked to qt5. moolticute's makefile contains cd build; qmake -qt=qt5 ../Moolticute.pro; $(MAKE) etc. The window manager/desktop environment (kde/kwin etc) and how it does dark vs light themes might also interact with qt's theming in different and weird ways... KDE is based on Qt so I'd expect it to work for me, but I guess something is broken somewhere.

[barathrm]

As this issue seems to indicate, the dark theme hasn't worked (at least on linux) since 2020 at least https://github.com/mooltipass/moolticute/issues/598 so I don't think it's packaging related, but rather an incomplete integration in moolticute or something.

[ghost]

@barathrm yes, I followed the instructions to manually install Moolticute for Debian 11 using CLI

[barathrm]

FYI, I built moolticute for qt6 and tested this with the standard breeze dark theme and it does not fix the issue. Here's how it looks with qt6 + dark theme:

moolticute/build$ ldd moolticute
        linux-vdso.so.1 (0x00007ffe8f9fc000)
        libQt6Widgets.so.6 => /usr/lib64/libQt6Widgets.so.6 (0x00007f4346b60000)
        libQt6Gui.so.6 => /usr/lib64/libQt6Gui.so.6 (0x00007f4346328000)
        libGLX.so.0 => /usr/lib64/libGLX.so.0 (0x00007f43462f0000)
        libOpenGL.so.0 => /usr/lib64/libOpenGL.so.0 (0x00007f43462c0000)
        libQt6WebSockets.so.6 => /usr/lib64/libQt6WebSockets.so.6 (0x00007f4346288000)
        libQt6Network.so.6 => /usr/lib64/libQt6Network.so.6 (0x00007f43460e8000)
        libQt6DBus.so.6 => /usr/lib64/libQt6DBus.so.6 (0x00007f4346030000)
        libQt6Core.so.6 => /usr/lib64/libQt6Core.so.6 (0x00007f4345a80000)

theme:

[Hypoon]

Moolticute has always had readability issues for me, too. I don't think I ever reported them, because I run Gentoo with my own custom theme. It's the same exact problem though. I may be able to assist in troubleshooting it, since Gentoo's package manager can readily recompile Qt and related packages more easily than most other distributions.

[limpkin]

@deXol could you put the screen captures and the details of your compilation trial on ubuntu?

[barathrm]

And distro details (window manager/desktop environment etc) probably matter. Might only work with one DE. FWIW my GTK theme is also dark in KDE.

[Hypoon]

If I'm not mistaken, one of the widget toolkits (either GTK or Qt, I can't remember) offers a theme that basically makes it mimic the current theme settings of the other. I think it might be Qt that can optionally mimic GTK, so if that theme is chosen, then the current GTK theme controls the appearance of Qt apps. It might have been the other way around, though, and this memory is from back when I was more interested in custom themes -- 15+ years ago (anybody remember Beryl?).

I run xmonad as my window manager, and I don't recall how I configured the themes for GTK and Qt applications on this system. I didn't go crazy, though. I'll try to refresh my memory and post my specific theme configurations here.

[deXol]

@deXol could you put the screen captures and the details of your compilation trial on ubuntu?

I am using Ubuntu 20.04.6 LTS:

And UI looks good with Dark mode:

[barathrm]

Thanks! Okay so on Ubuntu + Gnome moolticute simply ignores the dark theme :D Whereas on KDE/other DEs some elements are working (working == adapting to the theme) and some not.

For instance some text becomes white, but the background also stays white while it should go dark.

[barathrm]

https://github.com/mooltipass/moolticute/releases/tag/v1.01.5-testing is still broken on openSUSE Tumbleweed, KDE, breeze dark theme. Some of the elements are fixed (the checkbox text), but not this stuff:

[limpkin]

pinging @deXol :)

[deXol]

Hello @barathrm, I installed v1.01.5-testing with the same configuration and UI looks ok, do you know what can be the difference? I also noticed your version is a little bit different, where is that 1.01.5.r0.g13fa0ec coming from?

[barathrm]

Hm. Not sure. Maybe Qt looks at the GTK theme? Though it seems to make no difference what gtk theme I set either...

The version string is set during the build process. My moolticute is from OBS (https://build.opensuse.org/package/show/home:fawz:mooltipass/moolticute-testing), you probably got yours somewhere else :thinking:

Any maybe the distro matters as well. Maybe some distros tweak KDE.

[ghost]

Hello again, any updates on this Moolticute theme issue with Linux Mint? I'm eager to know if there has been any progress. Thanks!

[limpkin]

I'm afraid this is very slow moving :/