[arch-general] GTK2 GUIs became a PITA after upgrade

[Sujith Manoharan]

Ralf Mardorf <silver.bullet at zoho.com> writes:
> after the last upgrade GTK2 apps running in an openbox session need more
> space, they became darker and in some windows even the fonts became
> less good readable. The reason that I dropped desktop environments was
> to get rid of chaotic designs and to keep a clear design and now even
> GTK2 apps in an openbox session became a parody.

For me, the recent fontconfig package in testing has changed the way
bold fonts are rendered. I have downgraded fontconfig manually since
I couldn't find a way to fix this.

With 2.11.94: http://msujith.org/dir/img/before-fontconfig-update.png
With 2.11.95: http://msujith.org/dir/img/after-fontconfig-update.png

I use the Greybird theme for gtk2 applications and it seems to be
okay. gtk-3.20 has changed theming and so all themes need to be
updated. After gtk-3.20, Greybird broke and I had to remove it
from gtk-3.0/settings.ini and use the default theme.

https://blogs.gnome.org/mclasen/2015/11/20/a-gtk-update/

All of this hand-holding is just painful and sometimes I just want to
compile Emacs with --with-x-toolkit=lucid and be done. :-)

Sujith