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gnome-shell crashed at some point and, upon reloading, all the text and almost all icons in the title bar, task bar, menus, and prompts are garbled.

I have a process that's been running for a week now; if it restarts, there's no way to recover the progress and I would have to start from scratch. So, I'm looking for a way to resolve this without killing the processes I currently have running.

Thank you in advance!

Screenshot of indicator panel

Screenshot of title bar, task bar, and menu

Screenshot of Unity search

Nathan J.B.
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  • "Repairing" the font cache may help: https://askubuntu.com/questions/1224125/font-characters-displayed-as-squares-in-ubuntu-18-04 – vanadium Apr 10 '22 at 10:18
  • @vanadium - Upon your suggestion, I tried that. Unfortunately it did not fix the problem. It's worth noting that it isn't just a font issue -- the icons don't appear correctly either. – Nathan J.B. Apr 10 '22 at 20:20
  • @Nmath - I've never experienced this before so I'm not sure how to reproduce it. gnome-shell is what crashed, so perhaps try running sudo killall -9 gnome-shell to see if that creates the same problem. It's also possible that RAM might have been maxed or near maxed at the time. – Nathan J.B. Apr 10 '22 at 20:21
  • @Nmath - Your comment is entirely incorrect & unhelpful. I provided a method of potentially reproducing the problem, though I can't be sure it will work - in 12 years of working in Linux, I've never experienced this. And I am absolutely willing to perform basic diagnostic steps, as demonstrated by my willingness to try vanadium's potential solution. "Turning it off and on again" is not a diagnostic ("practice or techniques of diagnosis"), it's a potential solution. If you have an actual diagnostic you think I should run (e.g. I can check/share logs, if I know which ones), I'm happy to do so. – Nathan J.B. Apr 10 '22 at 20:41
  • @vanadium - Correction. Your solution DID fix the menus and prompts! (Basically, anything with text.) Thank you! Icons are still garbled, though... – Nathan J.B. Apr 10 '22 at 20:43
  • Does this answer your question? Font characters displayed as squares in Ubuntu 18.04 – karel Apr 11 '22 at 12:11

1 Answers1

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Take a look at this answer: gnome icons messed up on top bar - show white blocks

In my case it started to happen (occasionally) after I replaced the monitor. Decreasing the font scale in Gnome Tweaks has fixed it:

enter image description here

Noam Manos
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