QuiteRSS Quirk
After updating the office desktop to Slackware 15.0 and when using KDE, QuiteRSS began shrinking the width of the columns in the headline pane to where none of the columns were readable. Manually restoring the column widths worked fine for the session. The next time QuiteRSS was launched the column widths again shrunk. The columns shrunk dynamically in real-time when accessing the feed list to populate the headline pane.
Toggling the left-side feed pane with Ctrl+D helped only a little. Searching the web found one person with the same complaint.
In the house network the problem existed only in KDE and not in TDE or Xfce.
Tinkering found the XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP=KDE environment variable to be part of the problem. Within a terminal window, unsetting the variable or changing the variable to a value other than KDE before launching QuiteRSS stopped the misbehavior.
Whether the problem is within QuiteRSS or KDE remains unknown.
A shell script wrapper already existed to discourage running QuiteRSS without a VPN connection. Modifying the script to include changing the environment variable ended the shrinking nonsense.
Newer is not always better.
Problem solved but Yet Another Example why updating computers is so frustrating.
Something always breaks. Always.
Posted: Category: Usability Tagged: Slackware
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