[Not exactly solved, but have moved on] Mate added after Kubuntu, Mate theme messed up

Support & Help Requests
#1

My apologies if the answer is out there somewhere, but I couldn’t find it.

My sister found a computer by the dumpster so I fixed it up and installed Kubuntu on it. Turns out that KDE/Plasma is a bit much for that computer so I thought I’d try installing Ubuntu Mate on it.

I installed ubuntu-mate-desktop and ubuntu-mate-core (or something like that; I’m on openSUSE Tumbleweed on my own pc) and after logging in the theme seems off. The biggest issue is that text in things like the menu and on the task bar buttons are extremely hard to read. If the task bar is a dark color, the text is also dark. Same with the light themes and light text. I remember seeing something like mate dark and mate light in the themes section. And there were a bunch of others with question marks in the theme image. I didn’t get a chance to grab a screenshot because it was getting late.

I’ll mess with it tomorrow if I get a chance, but I’d like to tackle it with a battle plan. Does anyone have a way to quickly get mate looking like it would on the live cd?

One last note, I also tried different layouts like redmond and cupertino. Didn’t sort out the problem for me.

Thanks in advance for any advice and help!

#2

What are the specs of the PC, make/model and GPU?. :grin:

#3

If you are not sure, open a terminal and run

Code:
inxi -b

#4

Here is the output from inxi -b:

System: Host: piggyfairy-Aspire-M5630 Kernel: 4.2.0-30-generic x86_64 (64 bit) Desktop: KDE 5 Distro: Ubuntu 15.10 wily Machine: Mobo: ACER model: EG31M v: R01-A3 Bios: American Megatrends v: R01-A3 date: 08/28/2007 CPU: Quad core Intel Core2 Quad Q6600 (-MCP-) speed: 2393 MHz (max) Graphics: Card: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD/ATI] RV610 [Radeon HD 2400 PRO] Display Server: X.Org 1.17.2 drivers: ati,radeon (unloaded: fbdev,vesa) Resolution: [email protected] GLX Renderer: Gallium 0.4 on AMD RV610 (DRM 2.43.0, LLVM 3.6.2) GLX Version: 3.0 Mesa 11.0.2 Network: Card: Realtek RTL8111/8168/8411 PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet Controller driver: r8169 Drives: HDD Total Size: 500.1GB (2.2% used) Info: Processes: 207 Uptime: 16:12 Memory: 985.3/2000.2MB Client: Shell (bash) inxi: 2.2.16

I haven’t had much of a chance to try to fix this on my own today. It’s been a busy day.

Thanks again for any advice!

#5

The second line says that your still running KDE.

Mate and KDE is not a very good combination in my opinion. They both bring in a lot of packages. I think you would be better off reinstalling Mate using the ubuntu mate iso.

Maybe wolfman has another idea.

#6

I did run the command from within KDE because that’s where I can see all the text properly lol. I was thinking about installing the numix themes and seeig if that does any good, but am unable to do that today. If I try it and it helps I’ll update.

I might also just install from scratch. Luckily, when I installed Kubuntu, I made the /home partition seperate from the / partition. That should make it so she doesn’t lose her important stuff (she does online college courses on it). I’ll just have to make sure to get rid of old config files before I install the new one if I go that route.

I’m still open to ideas though! I thought about deleting the mate config files and restarting. My thinking is that they’ll get recreated with defaults; I just don’t know if that would work and it should, in theory, already be at the defaults. We’ll see.

#7

Hi @anon42388993 & @theonewho,

I am not too sure about a conflict between KDE and Mate but what I would do is install Mate using the “Something Else Method” which will keep her files intact, just make sure you DON’T FORMAT THE HOME PARTITION! (You shouldn’t need to worry about the config files using this method but you will need to install any apps she had previously installed!):

#8

Thanks for the suggestion wolfman. I may end up doing that in the future when I can be sure that I’ll have an hour or so to install and set it up the way she likes it.

For now I ended up installing Cinnamon with the Numix icons and borders. It’s probably not as light on resources as Mate would be, but I’ve noticed a definite difference for the better when compared to KDE.

1 Like