Description of problem: Installing some snaps like codium are having font issues in dialog windows. This has been widely discussed upstream [1] Tried multiple workarounds and none of them are working: ~~~ sudo rm /var/cache/fontconfig/* rm ~/.cache/fontconfig/* rm -f ~/snap/codium/current/.cache/ fc-cache -r -v snap run --shell codium fc-cache -r -v exit ~~~ I also tried this with VScodium running Arch wiki [a] suspects it's an issue caused by fontconfig>=2.13.91 Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): fontconfig-2.13.93-6.fc34.x86_64 snapd-selinux-2.51-1.fc34.noarch snap-confine-2.51-1.fc34.x86_64 snapd-2.51-1.fc34.x86_64 How reproducible: All the time Steps to Reproduce: 1. snap install codium 2. Open Folder dialog or any kind of dialog Actual results: All the text is square instead of readable characters Expected results: We should be able to read the text. Additional info: [a] https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Talk:Snap [1] ~~~ https://forum.snapcraft.io/t/snapped-app-not-loading-fonts-on-fedora-and-arch/12484/39 https://forum.inkdrop.app/t/snap-with-no-visible-letters-in-system-dialogs-on-fedora/2077/3 https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Talk:Snap https://githubmemory.com/repo/snapcrafters/codium/issues/6 https://github.com/VSCodium/vscodium/issues/426 ~~~
The problem is that the old version of fontconfig can't deal with variable fonts properly. the solution is indeed to bump the cache version though, removing variable fonts from the system could be a workaround if no strong reason to keep it there. You may have two variable fonts installed. one is google-noto-sans-sinhala-vf-fonts which is used for Sinhala. another one is Cantarell-VF.otf included in abattis-cantarell-fonts. it may be hard to remove the package because it is the default system UI fonts in GNOME. just FYI.
This issue should be fixed in 2.13.96 for rawhide and f36. but we can't update the package for f34 and f35 because the changes made in this release changes some default behavior. I'll keep this open until f35 is EOL'd.
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This has already been fixed in f36 as noted. so closing.