Broken fonts on Firefox
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Hi, first of all thanks a lot for your awesome work! GSDE is really pretty complete and very usable, especially considering the age of the different parts. You found a way to save their lives, bring them to the present and make them play nicely with one another, and I can imagine using this system as a daily driver! I played with Nextspace before, and while it felt more polished (being a stricter NextStep clone), it also felt too old-school and too incomplete to be used today.
I am using GSDE on top of Debian 12 inside VMware, went from a minimal install and added XDM for login. Then installed Firefox ESR (115.5.0esr) via apt. The fonts are broken on any website with it (see screenshot). I also tried installing mscorefonts, and changing the default fonts, which didn't solve the issue. This problem occurs with any system font, not with webfonts provided by the website. And it only happens on websites, not on the Firefox UI itself (e. g. settings work fine).
I also installed Brave which doesn't have this issue. The shipped browser also works fine. And Firefox on Nextspace works fine as well.
Is there anything else I can try to make Firefox pick up system fonts? Might this be a Debian issue or can you reproduce the on a different distro?
I created special integration wrapper that solves this problem. You'll have to rebuild the gs-desktop as I improved the way wrappers work for non-GNUstep apps .
You'll find the wrapper in gs-desktop/extra-apps.
Added benefit is that docking the Firefox icon should work now as expected. And Firefox should use the same command modifier as the rest GNUstep desktop (e.g. alt-c / alt-v / alt-n etc.)
Awesome, it works! Can't believe you solved this so quickly and made it even better – thanks so much! I can also confirm the shortcuts are now GNUstep-like, really nice! I'll check out the other changes/improvements and additional app wrappers you did in the next couple of days. I think the new app wrappers will be a great starting point for more custom wrappers which users can create.
My solution so far was switching to Flatpak apps, but this is something that might not work for everyone or all apps. But launching Flatpak apps via app wrappers also works fine.
I was thinking about the possibility of a script that could convert .desktop app launchers to app wrappers automatically. But it looks like some apps need some special treatment. Also, SVG app icons would have to be converted to PNG. Not sure if all of this could be automated in a sensible, bullet-proof way.