Nautilus' "black background" issue will be fixed soon

Jul 14, 2016 10:40 GMT  ·  By

We reported two weeks ago on the upcoming availability of a major GTK+ 3.20 / GNOME Stack 3.20 update for the now-in-development Ubuntu 16.10 (Yakkety Yak) operating system.

At that moment in time, Ubuntu developer Iain Lane told us that he managed to port the Ambiance theme to the latest GTK+ 3.20 technologies, and that he also updated some of the GNOME components Ubuntu is using, such as the Nautilus file manager, and Baobab disk usage analyzer tool, along with the GTK+ port of Mozilla Firefox 47.0 for Ubuntu 16.10.

These were available for users who had the courage to test them in a PPA only for the upcoming Yakkety Yak release (see installations instructions below), but bugs were present, and not everything worked as expected. Today, July 14, Iain Lane has updated his initial statement, informing us that he has also managed to fully port the Radiance theme to GTK+ 3.20 and that everything will land in the main Ubuntu 16.10 repos soon.

"Radiance is now also ported. A few other bugs were fixed along the way. I'm investigating a remaining problem with Nautilus causing the background to be black some of the time, and Marco is hopefully going to help me with some unity-greeter issues, then we should be good to go and fix remaining niggles in Ubuntu directly," explained the developer.

Here's how to install Nautilus 3.20 and GTK+ 3.20 in Ubuntu 16.10

If you can't wait any longer, though you should because of the nasty Nautilus "black background" issue, you can install the massive GTK+ 3.20 / GNOME Stack 3.20 update via the official PPA repository, which can be installed in Ubuntu 16.10 (Yakkety Yak) using the commands listed below in the Terminal app.

sudo apt-add-repository ppa:ubuntu-desktop/gtk320
sudo apt update
sudo apt dist-upgrade