Blank/malfunctioning UI elements in QT applications (e.g. VNote, Ghostwriter)

Recently I’ve been playing around with EndeavourOS and find it pretty nice to work with. The only issue so far is that my favourite Markdown notetaking app, VNote, doesn’t work properly. For some reason, the Markdown preview simply fails to appear at all!

Screenshot_2022-05-05_11-39-24

The bug happens regardless of whether VNote was run from an AppImage or installed via AUR. System updates do not resolve the issue.

This is how the VNote Markdown preview should look (in my other Linux Mint installation):

Screenshot at 2022-05-05 13-41-44


I suspect that it might have something to do with QT as I had tried another Markdown editor app, Ghostwriter, and almost all UI components refuse to load properly. Both VNote and Ghostwriter use QT.

Screenshot_2022-05-05_14-11-29

Has anyone experienced blank UI elements with QT-based apps? Looking forward to any advice!

someone had the same problem and solved it by installing AppImage.

First of all it helps which desktop u use… probably Xfce. Thats means an Xfce desktop.

gtk3 and QT5 are both different beast. xfce does use qt5ct. does use standard Fusion mayby it something on that you can change color profile also offcourse.

focuswriter also?

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for the current version of vnote you need Qt 5.15

check the qt version on your system

i have installed vnote without problems.

vnote_screen

check if the following packages are installed:

qt5-webengine
qt5-webchannel
qt5-declarative
qt5-base → version Qt 5.15

[pycrk@ovoEnd ~]$ pacman -Qs qt5-webengine
local/qt5-webengine 5.15.9-2 (qt qt5)
    Provides support for web applications using the Chromium browser project
[pycrk@ovoEnd ~]$ pacman -Qs qt5-webchannel
local/qt5-webchannel 5.15.3+kde+r3-1 (qt qt5)
    Provides access to QObject or QML objects from HTML clients for seamless integration of Qt applications with HTML/JavaScript clients
[pycrk@ovoEnd ~]$ pacman -Qs qt5-declarative
local/qt5-declarative 5.15.3+kde+r20-1 (qt qt5)
    Classes for QML and JavaScript languages
[pycrk@ovoEnd ~]$ pacman -Qs qt5-base
local/qt5-base 5.15.3+kde+r145-1 (qt qt5)
    A cross-platform application and UI framework
[pycrk@ovoEnd ~]$ yay -Qs vnote
local/vnote 3.13.0-1
    A Vim-inspired note-taking application, especially for Markdown.
[pycrk@ovoEnd ~]$ 


I’m using the default XFCE desktop, forgot to mention this. Focuswriter works as expected though.

In my setup, qt5-webengine, qt5-webchannel, qt5-declarative and qt5-base are all already installed with Qt version 5.15.

[perry@perry-USB2 ~]$ pacman -Qs qt5-
local/qt5-base 5.15.3+kde+r145-1 (qt qt5)
    A cross-platform application and UI framework
local/qt5-declarative 5.15.3+kde+r20-1 (qt qt5)
    Classes for QML and JavaScript languages
local/qt5-location 5.15.3+kde+r2-1 (qt qt5)
    Provides access to position, satellite and area monitoring classes
local/qt5-multimedia 5.15.3+kde+r0-1 (qt qt5)
    Classes for audio, video, radio and camera functionality
local/qt5-svg 5.15.3+kde+r12-1 (qt qt5)
    Classes for displaying the contents of SVG files
local/qt5-translations 5.15.3+kde+r2-1 (qt qt5)
    A cross-platform application and UI framework (Translations)
local/qt5-webchannel 5.15.3+kde+r3-1 (qt qt5)
    Provides access to QObject or QML objects from HTML clients for seamless integration of Qt
    applications with HTML/JavaScript clients
local/qt5-webengine 5.15.9-2 (qt qt5)
    Provides support for web applications using the Chromium browser project
[perry@perry-USB2 ~]$ yay -Qs vnote
local/vnote 3.13.0-1
    A Vim-inspired note-taking application, especially for Markdown.

I did find out something though. My Endeavour OS setup is running from a USB drive, so I was running it from my Thinkpad Yoga laptop today and noticed that VNote was able to work completely fine with no blank UI elements. It’s only when I run it from my desktop computer that VNote refuses to work.

Currently suspecting some obscure display driver issue now. My desktop computer’s CPU is an Intel Core i5-11400 with Intel UHD 730 integrated graphics.