Virtualbox 7.2.0 installation failed: blank menus

[boxino]

Good morning I use Ubuntu Mate 24.04.3 and I updated from 7.1.12 to 7.2.0. After the update, unfortunately, the menus are empty, the writings are not charitable. I tried to reinstall but nothing the menus, although working, do not appear. This is a big problem.
What's going on?

[g0zer]

I see the same thing installing virtualbox 7.2.0 r170228 new on a fresh install of xubuntu 24.04.3

[boxino]

I have done numerous tests but all without success. Completely deleted the previous installations and reinstalled from scratch, installed on the 7.2.0 version present, restarted the PC, without restarting the PC: nothing. Menus do not appear.
I had to go back to version 7.1.12.
Any suggestions would be welcome.

[arQon]

Too many options to pick one with any confidence, but on top of all the "normal" paths to bugs: Qt tends to try to use whatever the GTK settings are for a given theme (fonts, colors, etc). There's a standard for this, but GNOME only follows it when it's convenient for them, and if Qt worked around one of the GNOME bugs (which it generally does) they might have accidentally broken the conforming part.
IIRC Qt used to support some environment variables as workarounds for this sort of thing, but that was at least two major versions ago so I have no idea if those still exist or not.

I can find what looks like a reference to this specific bug starting with Qt 6.4, but I don't have the sort of time chasing it down would take: reverting to 7.1 is certainly the right move for at least now.

[boxino]

Quite a mess...
I hope for a solution in a future version.

[klaus]

We're working on it... try the latest "development snapshot" test builds. There are tweaks to the theme handling which avoids the previously used gtk2 plugin which seems to have become totally unusable.

[HowardR]

Same issue (blank menu text) here with host: Ubuntu 24.04.3 noble

[arQon]

We're working on it... try the latest "development snapshot" test builds. There are tweaks to the theme handling which avoids the previously used gtk2 plugin which seems to have become totally unusable.

Not trying to nitpick here, but just FYI this is entirely GTK3 code, regardless of what Qt calls its plugin.
Will try the dev builds tomorrow, thanks.

[arQon]

Tried 7.2.1 r170365 from the dev builds - unfortunately it's no different, with both the main VBox Manager UI and (as you'd expect, given that) the guest UI still completely devoid of text for all menu items.

[arQon]

Unsurprisingly, the 7.2.2 release has the same problem still.

However, the quest for a Dark Mode VBox here - viewtopic.php?t=110432 - does provide the answer:

Code: Select all

export QT_STYLE_OVERRIDE=Fusion

causes 7.2.2 to successfully populate the menus. GTK_THEME is unnecessary, for me at least.