How do I make dialog boxes readable on 23.04 and change menu type?

DonP

6/3/24, 8:07 PM

After installing a 1TB IDE (not SATA) SSD, I did a fresh install of Ubuntu 23.04 (just Ubuntu, not Kubuntu, Lubuntu or any other flavor) on an old laptop and selected the Light theme during installation. However, settings dialogs, the Files app and other dialog boxes have very dark grey text on a solid black background which is impossible to read so how can I fix that from the command line? Even Terminal itself has the issue but not quite so bad although the X to close it is invisible for the same reason.

Also, I do not care for the default menuing system which to me is awkward and non-intuitive so would like to change to the same as my desktop PC (KDE/Xfce I believe running on Ubuntu Studio) without losing the nice default Lobster desktop image and Ubuntu logos?

In the capture below, the appearance settings are too dark to see and even the sample background images do not show at all. The second is of the file manager.

Can you be more specific about what you want to change?

What do I want to change? I want to change to something useable as this is obviously not.

0 + 4

colors

kde

themes

Nmath

6/3/24, 8:59 PM

Can you be more specific about what you want to change? And what flavour of Ubuntu are you using? It's a bit incredulous that everything is "impossible to read". If that's true, please file a bug report because the UI should not be illegible... If you're using GNOME, and you want to customize the UI, I recommend you choose another flavour. You mentioned KDE and Xfce-- those are both good choices if you want to make customizations. GNOME is not easily customizable because it's not designed to be. It's not a priority of the GNOME design language. Thankfully, there are many DE choices.

Archisman Panigrahi

6/3/24, 10:48 PM

Can you post a screenshot of what is impossible to read? Which app?

DonP

6/4/24, 9:14 PM

As I said, I am running Ubuntu 23.04. Not Lubuntu, Kubuntu or anything else. Anyway, I have since installed Kfce over it, changed the desktop background and Activities icon to something more pleasing so no more impossible to read screens. This isn’t an isolated problem as it did it when I recently installed Ubuntu 23.04 onto a PC but by main PC when it was updated to 23.04 did not have the issue but it also did not have Gnome.

DonP

6/4/24, 9:38 PM

@Archisman Panigrahi Captures have been added and to clarify, the issue is system-wide on what is supposed to be the Light setting. I shudder to think of what Dark would be!

Elon Musk

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EN: How do I make dialog boxes readable on 23.04 and change menu type?

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