[Manjaro LINUX] No tooltips for sidebar windows (Palette, Mixer, Play Panel, etc.)

• Apr 10, 2020 - 03:50
Reported version
3.4
Type
Ergonomical (UX)
Frequency
Many
Severity
S3 - Major
Reproducibility
Always
Status
won't fix
Regression
No
Workaround
Yes
Project
MuseScore

The tooltip (aka popups) showing descriptions, names, etc. on many palette items are not shown. Actually i didn't know they were supposed to be there and always wondered how i could learn the name of an obscure palette item from just looking at it, until saw proof of their existence as i watched this video tutorial today.

This leads me to believe that there must be many other tooltips i cannot see on other dockable windows (i.e. navigator, mixer, what have you). No matter whether i have them docked, tabbed, or floating, no tooltips for me. Tooltips on main buttons at the top all work fine.

Maybe a linux only issue?

OS: Manjaro Linux, Arch.: x86_64, MuseScore version (64-bit): 3.4.2., revision: 148e43f
Qt Version 5.14.2.

Comments

• Apr 10, 2020 - 03:54
Severity S4 - Minor ⇒ S3 - Major

Actually, from an ergonomical/UX standpoint this is major. From a functional perspective it would be minor.

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• Apr 10, 2020 - 04:15
Title No tooltips for sidebar windows (Palette, Inspector, etc.) ⇒ [LINUX] No tooltips for sidebar windows (Palette, Inspector, etc.)
Frequency Many ⇒ Once

They do show on Windows.

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• Apr 11, 2020 - 01:31
Title [LINUX] No tooltips for sidebar windows (Palette, Inspector, etc.) ⇒ [Manjaro LINUX] No tooltips for sidebar windows (Palette, Mixer, Play Panel, etc.)
Frequency Once ⇒ Many
Status active ⇒ won't fix
Workaround No ⇒ Yes

As it goes, i found a workaround sort of by accident... and then two more (which are basically variations of the first, TL;DR workarounds at the end of this post). After digging a little deeper i'm 99.9% certain this is not about the MuseScore code base itself, it must be something about how it gets wired up into my system, so i'm closing this as "won't fix".

The workarounds are shockingly simple, and i'm really at my wit's end trying to understand why this way of starting MuseScore would initialize the MuseScore GUI so differently than the standard .desktop entry so i will report this over at https://gitlab.manjaro.org/packages/community/musescore/-/issues, hoping anybody there can make sense of it.

Findings (debugging related stuff)

  • Tested in a Ubuntu VirtualBox today and all tooltips work fine there - even when i tried with lightdm & XFCE to match up my display manager & desktop environment configuration
  • Tested installing/running an AppImage, Snap or FlatPak of MuseScore on my host, with all of these the issue did not appear
  • Issue only appears when MuseScore was installed through standard system mechanisms, namely using pacman/pamac or (interestingly enough) when sudo make install was used to install a build compiled from source code - which therefore i assume in the end just makes a standard system call that utilizes the same tooling under the hood.

Workarounds (any will do)

a. In the file explorer (thunar), just double click a score file (.mscz, .mscx)
b. In the file explorer (thunar), right-click on any (really ANY) file, select "Open with..." and then MuseScore. With this method other versions such as custom builds from source can also be used with working tooltips :)
c. In the terminal, use xgd-open /path/to/my-score.mscz - which i understand is basically what happens behind the scenes in workaround (a.)

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