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I use Ubuntu 18.04 LTS, with GNOME desktop and Papirus icons pack.

When I click on the Show Applications launcher, everything is in order. But when I enter some text in the search box, the search results, are skewed to the right, instead of aligning to the center. See the screenshot below.

Screenshot showing skewed search results

This makes it extremely difficult to make out what the results are.

Can someone suggest what the problem might be?

BeastOfCaerbannog
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Chaitanya Chavali
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1 Answers1

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As UnKNOWn has suggested, this is probably an issue related to the GNOME Shell theme you are using. Changing the theme is expected to solve this problem.

In general, themes can cause unexpected issues, like the one you experienced. This is one of the reasons why some GNOME developers try to raise awareness against third party theming and ask distributions not to theme their apps.

Regarding users tinkering with themes, they mention:

If you like to tinker with your own system, that’s fine with us.
However, if you change things like stylesheets and icons, you should be aware that you’re in unsupported territory. Any issues you encounter should be reported to the theme developer, not the app developer.

BeastOfCaerbannog
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  • Well it would be less necessary to reach for themes and CSS and dozens of hours wasted if they would expose more theme parameters to the end users for customization. One significant example being the background of the omnipresent lightbox overlay. Or the artificially shrinked maximum size of thumbnails in Nautilus. Theme customization should not be an uphill battle. Customization used to be not only an expectation but even a selling point of Linux systems. – Levente Feb 02 '21 at 14:03
  • @Levente Indeed. However creating a theme API would require more people, money and time investment from GNOME's side and obviously this isn't a priority (I don't know if it's even in their to-do list). I cannot blame developers building apps for GNOME for not wanting to handle theming issues. – BeastOfCaerbannog Feb 02 '21 at 14:07
  • @Levente I see the point of the edit of your comment. I agree with that. – BeastOfCaerbannog Feb 02 '21 at 14:08
  • Yeah, themes are always the last priority and least respected aspects of software development, basically anywhere, maybe except for in predatory marketing. Yet themes are a number one player in defining not only user experience, but basic ergonomy. If it should receive more acknowledgement it is for at least the ergonomy. – Levente Feb 02 '21 at 14:10
  • Also if we could push in a few parameters via the gsettings api / dconf editor, that would be a huuuuge step forward. One positive representative of this idea (even if it may feel a bit on the over-done side) is the customizability of the dock. – Levente Feb 02 '21 at 14:14
  • @Levente I agree that these are options that are useful/essential for many users, but that solely relies to GNOME's willingness to provide them. From a developer's perspective I can understand why GNOME doesn't provide them, for the near future at least. They focus more on the DE stability and refinement, which has made recent GNOME versions one of the most coherent least buggy modern DE's, at least from my experience. I would also like more features, but they obviously mean more bugs. So, for the time being I'm quite happy with what GNOME provides and extensions cover many of my needs. – BeastOfCaerbannog Feb 02 '21 at 15:43