Created attachment 181554 [details] No text, only boxes SUMMARY Hi there, since yesterday evening, all fonts are gone throughout KDE on my system. I don't know why, I started two distroboxes and now on my complete system there are no texts anymore lol Luckily though, apps installed through flatpak still work, so I can at least create this bug report. I attached a screenshot to show the issue. I found this reddit post: https://www.reddit.com/r/archlinux/comments/d4mm4a/arch_linux_kde_plasma_displaying_squares_instead/ which sounds and looks very similar. It seems like QT apps are affected. However, I could copy the system information from the "About system" page, so copying text seems to work :D STEPS TO REPRODUCE Unfortunately, I don't know how to reproduce this. Maybe something changed my GTK settings, though I don't know why (I installed virt-manager in a distrobox, could this be the issue?) OBSERVED RESULT All system QT apps show boxes instead of text EXPECTED RESULT My apps have text SOFTWARE/OS VERSIONS Operating System: Yuga Linux 20250515 KDE Plasma Version: 6.3.5 KDE Frameworks Version: 6.14.0 Qt Version: 6.9.0 Kernel Version: 6.13.7-1-yuga (64-bit) Graphics Platform: Wayland Processors: 16 × AMD Ryzen 7 7840U w/ Radeon 780M Graphics Memory: 30.7 GiB of RAM Graphics Processor: AMD Radeon 780M Manufacturer: Framework Product Name: Laptop 13 (AMD Ryzen 7040Series) System Version: A7 ADDITIONAL INFORMATION Yuga Linux is based on openSUSE and uses the official openSUSE Tumbleweed repositories
Nope, the reddit issue is soething else, I don't know how to fix it :D It looks like the fonts are missing, but I can't check what font is selected/available because the font menu in system settings is also just boxes that I can't seem to copy.
In .config/kcmfonts the only content is [General] forceFontDPI=0
I fixed the issue. :) Turns out my font cache was broken as it seems for some reason. When I ran fc-list | head it returned nothing at all. So I did: rm -rf ~/.cache/fontconfig sudo rm -rf /var/cache/fontconfig And to rebuild the cache: sudo fc-cache -r -v fc-cache -r -v I rebuilt it for root and for my local user, as I guess both are relevant? Anyway, now it's working again after logging out and back in yey! I can use my notebook again :) I leave this open as I guess that Plasma should _try_ to detect this situation and handle it itself - being left with empty boxes is NOT a great experience and rendered me almost unable to do anything.
I'm glad to hear you found the root cause of the problem. I'm not seeing this in OpenSuse Tumbleweed or on Solus git-master. I'll let developers more versed in the font cache take a further look.
(In reply to TraceyC from comment #4) > I'm glad to hear you found the root cause of the problem. > > I'm not seeing this in OpenSuse Tumbleweed or on Solus git-master. I'll let > developers more versed in the font cache take a further look. Hi, it happened to me again. I setup a distrobox with virt-manager following the official guide: https://github.com/89luca89/distrobox/blob/main/docs/posts/run_libvirt_in_distrobox.md Since this is the second time I've setup this distrobox and the second time this error occurs, I feel like they are linked in some way.
Thanks for the additional information. At least there's a way this can be reproduced It seems like we should be something detecting an invalid cache and clearing it
The Fontconfig cache isn't KDE's responsibility; this should be reported to the Fontconfig folks so they can look into it. Cache invalidation is one of those hard problems to solve.