[tde-users] Re: non-starting browsers - the whole sad history

Okay, so like I said to Nik, I don't know how "fresh" is your installation. Mine is within the past few days. But at least it gives me something for comparison. For this comparison to be more exact, it would have to be a reinstallation or at least an upgrade within the past few days. (This started maybe the 23rd, the day after that robot cartoon that I sent; which I say because I was using Icecat when I originally happened on that page at the New Yorker site.) Today is the 27th; so about the 23rd until now is what I mean by a "fresh" installation. My machine (description taken from manufacturer's site) is this: Lenovo Ideapad 3 15 15.6_ Laptop AMD Ryzen 3 8GB Memory 128GB SSD I had thought it came with a 250 GB SSD by default; somewhere I have the original. Anyway, I took out the factory SSD and put in a new 2 TB SSD, one of those newer ones, SSD2 or whatever they are called. They look very different from the first run of SSDs. For the record, as I stated before, I had voided my warranty within the first day or so, once I had my new SSD. I fiddled around with trying to install Whonix, but that proved a bit too complicated for now. Within the first few days, I had it up and running tolerably well, and since then it had only ever improved. Up until a few days ago, things were working well, and I had not really changed much of anything. LibreOffice worked, but it's the GUI interface that hurts my eyes and makes it hard to work. OpenOffice installs, but crashes or doesn't launch. When I go back to LibreOffice, sometimes that give me a problem. But in general, Office programs are not the problem here, because I haven't had either one installed while I've had these recent issues. I did an upgrade, nothing was added. Shortly thereafter, a few of my programs started acting weird, such as text editors. So I eventually decided to reinstall my OS, but though to take out non-free and contrib from my repos before reinstallation. After reinstallation, same procedures and programs added as usual, I immediately began to have problems with those browsers mentioned earlier (most "modern" or "mainstream" browsers such as firefox, icecat, etc., but also seamonkey, midori, chromium, epiphany, etc.); only palemoon and links2 are dependable running in the TDE desktop. To test whether my changes in repositories had any effect, I put non-free and contrib back in, did another upgrade, another reinstallation, and see no appreciable difference regarding these problems, so once again I took those lines out of my sources.list, because my network and so on seem to work okay. When I booted into my XFCE desktop, which I had used for installation, all these browsers worked fine. I have not tried either Libre Office or Open Office to see if they will run under XFCE. Regarding Libre Office versus Open Office: I would gladly go with Libre Office, although I would really like to be able to force my TDE colors onto the LO GUI interface, because it is actually painful for me to stare at it for longer than about five minutes. I would still like to use Open Office, but that may not be possible. My workaround is to keep exporting my document to a pdf file, then switching to that screen where I can use kpdf-trinity and my TDE colors; for revisions and other changes, I switch back to my office program, make those corrections, export to pdf again, then return to reading the exported document in kpdf. So it is sort of possible for me to use Libre Office or Open Office, though this is still not ideal. The main problem, as I said, is whatever has caused these browsers and other programs that cannot the mixed gtk2 and gtk3 that is affecting either TDE itself, or at any rate my own machine. I have tried taking those things out, putting them back in; tried taking them out a few at a time (checking to see what else they will affect), putting them back in a few at at time. I did not try to track down and purge those problem Gnomes until long after these problems arose. So I did not cause my system to break by getting rid of Gnomish dependencies; the breakage was already happening after a simple upgrade from the same system which had been running stable since early December. Sorry for the lengthy description; but I wanted to lay to rest the false notion that I somehow did this to myself by removing essential packages. All I did was a simple upgrade. There after I tried removing non-free and contrib; then I tried adding them back in. Since then, in the past few days, I tried a couple new reinstallations, and these same problems persist. I hope this makes clear the general sequence of events that led me into this mess. As I pointed out earlier, if these browsers work fine in XFCE but not in TDE, then it seems to me that this ought to concern us who run TDE, as it could be a sign of what's to come. Thanks everybody for your patience. Help or suggestions are appreciated. Bill