Missing letters in menus and folder names

The names of my folders and the menus are not displayed correctly (even the tabs names in firefox). A lot of letters are missing. When cross over with the mouse pointer, part of them are correctly displayed. Contrary, the content of askubuntu site, for example, is displayed correct. It does not always happens, usually a restart solve the problems for a while. I have Ubuntu 14.04. I don't know how to tag this question, so I'll mark it as display related, even though is not really this.

Solution 1:

There seems to be a (bad) fix for this problem as described here

The problem seems not to appear by using the old UXA hardware acceleration for for the Intel graphic cards.

Edit the following section of the /etc/X11/xorg.conf file such that AccelMethod is set to "uxa" or create the file if it does not yet exist:

Section "Device"
   Identifier  "Intel Graphics"
   Driver      "intel"
   Option      "AccelMethod"  "uxa"
EndSection

Reboot or restart X.

The problem went away for me, but I only restarted a couple of times since I changed the file so it might still come back. Also, note that UXA acceleration is considerably slower!

edit: There is a fix for this in the repository by now. If you still experience this issue you either did not update your system for a while or it has a different cause and I suggest filing a new bug.

Solution 2:

As mentioned in the comment above regarding the missing letters link, I have this specific problem (on 16.04, usually after returning from suspend), and so far, using unity/gnome tweak and switching fonts to greyscale anti-aliasing is working: https://askubuntu.com/a/633435/172307

Solution 3:

This fixed the problem for me, Updated and Optimized Open Graphics Drivers

https://launchpad.net/~oibaf/+archive/ubuntu/graphics-drivers

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:oibaf/graphics-drivers
sudo apt-get update

Solution 4:

I had the same issue. I fixed it on my Chromebook Pixel LS (booting into 14.04 w/ Gnome DE) by not using any Ubuntu family fonts. YMMV

Solution 5:

According to https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?pid=1633207#p1633207 this bug is caused by some unindentified change in Linux kernel version 4.3 or 4.4. Workaround is to use kernel version 4.2 or older, or update to version 4.6 or later. I don't know if kernel version 3.x has this bug.

For Ubuntu 16.04 the fix is simple:

sudo apt install linux-generic-hwe-16.04

or (to get better performance as a side-effect)

sudo apt install linux-lowlatency-hwe-16.04

Some hardware may not be compatible with lowlatency kernel so you need to test if your system works.

Installing unofficial development drivers from https://launchpad.net/~paulo-miguel-dias/+archive/ubuntu/mesa or https://launchpad.net/~oibaf/+archive/ubuntu/graphics-drivers may also fix the issue.