Fedora Upgrade Made Ribbon Sizing Go Gargantuan

[JoB2]

Hello everyone, yesterday I took the leap of faith and upgraded my work laptop’s Fedora (KDE Spin) from 39 to 40. Now, when I use LibreOffice, Fonts and Icons in the ribbons etc.¹ have become WAY TOO LARGE - to the point that popup submenus are unusable due to buttons etc. running into each other trying to squeeze in. I can’t even properly read the version number from the “About” popup anymore (rpm says it’s 24.2.6.2-2.fc40.x86_64)!

¹ “Main” window menu is still under the WM’s control, sheet content can easily be resized with the normal zoom slider, but ribbons, popup menus, status bar, sheet selector bar (in calc), … remain affected.

What I tried (based on web searches) so far:

• Changing LibreOffice’s theme a couple times - exchanged the icons’ artwork, but did nothing to fonts or sizes.
• Some matches spoke of a zoom factor that can be set in the same set of submenus - my LibreOffice doesn’t have that.

Can someone please help me dial things back down from eleven … ?

Other observations, in case they matter:

• In the course of the post-upgrade cleanup, a bunch of “unneeded” font packages got deinstalled …
• Upon opening one existing spreadsheet first, I noticed that its contents were way enlarged, too. That was easily fixed with the zoom slider, though (dialing 160% (IIRC) back to 75%).
• I also found that a couple columns and cells - not all of them! - needed me to change their font color from white back to black as well.
• There seem to be some issues with the window manager in general - as in, windows auto-resizing whenever I switch away from the virtual desktop it’s on, xsel addressing different paste buffers all of a sudden etc… Once I have an opportunity to do a complete logout, I shall doublecheck whether I’ve been forcefully switched from X11 to Wayland and whether I can switch back …

[JoB2]

Okaaaaaaayyyyyy … I have NO idea how to explain this, but: After experimenting with a freshly-created user, the display settings, returning them all to the original values (specifically:

), and logging back into my “real” account … the ribbons++ looked OK again, but the actual spreadsheet was illegibly small; I returned the zoom slider from 75% to the 160% I observed when the problem began and … hey presto, everything looks normal now.

…

… so, who do I credit for the official solution?

[ajlittoz]

Yourself ! Congratulations, this was not obvious. I noticed many things changed in display with the 39-40 transition. In particular, I can no longer adjust gamma to account for my specific monitors which are way too bright, though I played with their own settings.

[JoB2]

Thanks; yeah, I’m not exactly done with this migration, but having a stumbling block in the way of me booking my work hours was a bit of a biggie …

(Remaining issues, in no particular order: Mozilla apps exhibit different mouse pointer weirdness than before (shrink to standard size instead of switching to plain X11 look near scrollbars); Teams (old Linux standalone app) resizes by itself (to filling only half the screen) whenever I switch to another virtual desktop and back; Teams is unable to share my desktop anymore (that one will likely force me to switch to using Teams in a browser); all old SDDM themes are broken; on my private laptop, upgrading from 39 to 40 completely FUBARed Kaffeine’s working with my DVB stick; …)

Oh, by the way: There indeed doesn’t seem to be a way to ask 40 for a non-Wayland session anymore.

[ajlittoz]

All these issues to be related to the Wayland switch. But it is far better than under 39. I postponed my migration to 40 because of the freezes under Wayland 39 (because of my old nVidia GPU). A mistake of mine damaged irrecoverably one of my disks, hopefully not containing important data. I decided to install a fresh 40 on it, just to test. As I discovered it behaved nicely, this gave me an incentive to upgrade my main disk. I don’t regret it. Many things have improved and several incompatibility bugs have been fixed. A surprising thing is the proprietary nVidia driver causes a kernel oops in the final phases of boot. nouveau handles fine my GPU.

I just hope for the removed features to pop back (like gamma and some others in the display settings).

Oh, while I think of it: KDE Plasma does not restore windows exactly as they were when you log out. I am not surprised at old SDDM themes failing because sddm was quite buggy under Wayland 39. Some job needs still to be done on it, though (for instance to allow “native” multi-session: presently, sddm does not exit, it remains inactive on VT2 and you must go through console mode to open other GUI sessions.

[JoB2]

FWIW, I’m in the habit of letting the laptop run for as long as I don’t have to move it around, typically 1+ week with 39. Today, at an uptime (and continuous GUI login) of 3.5 days, the LibreOffice problem appeared again, but only with newly opened spreadsheets. During those 3.5 days, I also got two or three popups that Plasma had crashed (likely on the occasion of me having KVM-switched to another machine).

Did updates, rebooted, problem remains present.

Still not a fan of 40, sorry …

[JoB2]

Another reboot, GUI login as main user, problem still present.
Logged out, logged in as a test user, no problem there.
Logged out, logged back in as main user, problem gone.
[headdesks profusely]

[ajlittoz]

My desktop is running 24/7 (because it hosts server) and is rather stable. The difference with your case is I launch LO only when needed and close it after use. So, I don’t know if long-lived tasks may impact LO behaviour.

Is your GPU some kind of nVidia (or affiliate brand)?

[JoB2]

No, just the laptop’s onboard video unit:
05:00.0 VGA compatible controller: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] Picasso/Raven 2 [Radeon Vega Series / Radeon Vega Mobile Series] (rev d1)
Speaking of letting LO run for a long time, note that neither restarting it nor rebooting the entire machine seems able to fix the issue once it appears …

[ajlittoz]

AMD Radeon: as far as I know, they don’t cause problems. At this stage, I think we can rule out GPU problems.

There is perhaps a setting in advanced configuration. Maybe @mikekaganski can help suggesting some tuning.

[JoB2]

Update: The “it fixed itself!” didn’t last, alas. However, today I noticed a dependency on a system setting: In my home setup, the fixed monitor is set (KDE system settings) to “125%” (-> screenshot 1) for sake of legibility, while the laptop’s builtin display remains at the default 100%.

I noticed that when I move the spreadsheet from the monitor to the display, the symptom disappears, and reappears when I move it back. So I set the monitor to 100% instead and presto, everything looks like indended (->screenshot 2 not doable for new users) …

It seems that when I change to 125% (-> screenshot 3 cannot do it, either), the features on the browser (that you don’t get to see) and the GUI-provided parts of the LibreOffice windows get sized down in terms of pixels, while the affected parts of the latter are sized up … ?

… which way around is this mechanism supposed to work … ??

[ajlittoz]

@JoB2

which way around is this mechanism supposed to work … ??

The scaling parameter acts like a magnifying glass. Therefore your 1920×1200 screen now displays only 1920÷1.25 × 1200÷1.25 = 1536×960 pixels of the original frame buffers making part of it invisible, or rather defines a new frame buffer mapped onto your whole screen area. Since the window frame, menu and tool bars keep the same height (in number of original pixels), this leaves less room for your contents, giving the impression the bars have gone “gargantuan”.

The scaling parameter is useful to compensate for different ppi density when the screens are side by side so that a window (or other displayed shape) remains “continuous” when straddling both screens.

Note also that in your configuration, tops (or bottoms) are not aligned.

[JoB2]

… it seems that fiddling with these settings without fully logging out and back in does not exactly produce stable results … switching back to 100% now, will report after I’ve had the time to do the full dance a couple times.

Note also that in your configuration, tops (or bottoms) are not aligned.

(Sorry, I took that screenshot while I was busy changing the factor. I aligned the bottoms again later - which is a somewhat empty exercise because the laptop’s standing off to the side, its display flipped open mainly so that the lid camera can see something, not used for anything unless I can set it to a 48+ pt font. )

[JoB2]

FWIW, I would still maintain that something about the implementation of the effect is wrong, because LibreOffice and other windows clearly scale differently on the same desktop+display. Let me force the two missing screenshots down this forum’s throat: #2 at 100%:

[JoB2]

And #3, after switching to 125%:

[ajlittoz]

I have no idea how this is implemented. I think it is spread between OS graphics and applications. Your #3 screenshot suggests LO gets screen size when probing, not viewport size. Thus LO still considers display area is 1920×1200 instead of 1536×960. Then elements overflow outside the viewport. Perhaps, the window manager is also impacted. Only a developer skilled in OS interface could answer.

[ajlittoz]

You probably damage your user profile during the upgrade. When doing the same leap from 39 to 40, I didn’t experience such issue but user experience in upgrading varies considerably.

Have a look at Tools>Options, LibreOffice>View. There is a section named *Icon Size. The first drop-down menu is Toolbar. Mine is set at Automatic but there are other choices as Small, Large and Extra Large. Revert to Automatic or Small.

PS1: Fedora 40 KDE Plasma seems to be Wayland-only. I feared it because my GPU is a no loner-supported nVidia one. Surprisingly, everything went very fine. nouveau driver performed very well while proprietary nVidia driver caused a kernel oops.

PS2: I retagged your question as common because it is not specific to Calc or Base.

[JoB2]

I seem to have only a choice between “automatic” and “small” there … selecting “small” reduced the size of the icons somewhat (still too large), but doesn’t seem to have touched anything else (see picture, actual LO on the left, screenshot of previous state to the right) …

[ajlittoz]

It is then possible that your upgrade also disturbed the OS font preferences (because of the switch from X11 to Wayland). Have a look at your system settings, Appearance & Style setion, Text & Fonts item, Fonts sub-item. See which size is configured. You mentioned “unneeded” fonts were removed during the upgrade. If they were used here, the setting may have been reverted to some inadequate default. I noticed that the installer likes to select Google fonts. I replaced them with Liberation Sans, making for slightly smaller menu bars and other UI widgets.

[JoB2]

They’re all set to sizes between 8 and 10 pt, and if the font selector popup window is any indication (I requested 24 pt in it for the screenshot to see that the example text gets scaled properly), the actual fonts are all available:

Besides … the OS selection is what controls the fonts on the top menu (the one going “Datei Bearbeiten Ansicht …” in my previous screenshots), isn’t it? That is the size it should be …