What is Wrong with Ubuntu 14.04? Font Rendering Bugs

Question

My Ubuntu is being very very irritating after upgrading to 14.04. Every once in a blue moon, certain glyphs just disappear from the screen.

Every once in a while, (even as I'm writing this question), all my i's are disappearing, with nothing being shown instead.

enter image description here

Actually, check this out:

Before typing more: enter image description here

After typing more: enter image description here

This is a system-wide problem, some screenshots from Firefox, Nautilus, etc:

enter image description here

How do I fix these errors?

I have the nVidia graphics driver installed right now, but even with a pristine install (with the nouveau driver, this problem was there)

I have the same problem without installing ubuntu, I just selected Try Ubuntu from live cd. But this scared me off from installing. — Samir Chauhan, Jun 17 '15 at 06:10
If it's system-wide, sounds like an issue with graphics card. But I'm not very knowledgeable in that — Sergiy Kolodyazhnyy, Jun 17 '15 at 08:00
Maybe related: http://askubuntu.com/questions/584922/how-do-i-fix-fonts-not-rendering-and-missing-letters — michael, Jun 18 '15 at 09:52

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Jun 20 '15 at 20:45

1

I have seen similar problems with 14.04. They seemed to be fixed in 14.10, and even better in 15.04 (this latter, specifically regarding nVidia cards). So upgrading will probably be worth a try.

The underlying problem seems to be a bug within Unity itself. I have not encountered anything like it on XFCE, KDE or Cinnamon. If you do not wish to install a full system (maybe on a second partition?), you could try one of these desktop managers, see if it plays better with your graphics card.

HTH.

answered Jun 20 '15 at 20:45

ALAN WARD

542

I have a strong doubt that it could be unity itself too, although I don't know how to verify this. Anyways, thanks for the answer. – kumarharsh Jun 22 '15 at 08:27
@kumar_harsh There are instructions on installing another desktop manager here: http://askubuntu.com/questions/65083/what-kinds-of-desktop-environments-and-shells-are-available You can have both Unity and Gnome-shell (for example) installed at the same time, and switch from one to another in the login screen. – ALAN WARD Jun 22 '15 at 10:00
1

Thanks for the links. I'm sure someone will find them useful. (I'm already aware of those things, just not motivated enough to go through the hassle of changing the DE again :P). As it stands, Unity has been buggy for quite some time and makes me throw up a little, but Gnome3 is not so good either. Have given LXDE a try a long time ago (looked stable, but badly dated UI). But this lamentation is for another post anyways, so let's stop it at that. – kumarharsh Jun 22 '15 at 11:47

What is Wrong with Ubuntu 14.04? Font Rendering Bugs

1 Answers1