Look & Feel troubles on Ubuntu

Question

I'm writing an app that requires some widgets to use different look & feels. The rest of the app uses the system look & feel.

My approach to this was while initializing the app to swap the LF for the desired one, create the component and then reset the LF. This worked fine on Windows operating systems, but while testing it on Ubuntu it failed to set the LF for the component in a bizarre way.

On Ubuntu, UIManager.getSystemLookAndFeelClassName() reports that that the LF is a javax.swing.plaf.metal.MetalLookAndFeel. This is the first bit of trouble - I'd expect it to return com.sun.java.swing.plaf.gtk.GTKLookAndFeel. The strange part is that my approach works when the program is using the Metal LF, but fails when using the GTK LF, where it sets the entire frame and all components within it to the GTK LF.

The following SSCCE demonstrates the issue:

import javax.swing.*;
import java.awt.*;

import static javax.swing.UIManager.*;

public class LaFTest {
    public static void main(String[] argv) throws ReflectiveOperationException, UnsupportedLookAndFeelException {
        String[] keys = {
                "java.specification.version",
                "java.version",
                "java.vm.version",
                "java.specification.vendor",
        };
        for (String key : keys) {
            System.out.printf("%-40s%s\n", key, System.getProperty(key));
        }

        System.out.println(UIManager.getSystemLookAndFeelClassName());

        // Swap for "com.sun.java.swing.plaf.gtk.GTKLookAndFeel"
        setLookAndFeel(UIManager.getSystemLookAndFeelClassName());
        JFrame frame = new JFrame("LaF Test");
        Container content = frame.getContentPane();
        content.setLayout(new GridLayout(2, 0));
        JButton button = new JButton("System");
        content.add(button);

        LookAndFeel previous = getLookAndFeel();
        for (LookAndFeelInfo feel : getInstalledLookAndFeels()) {
            if (feel.getName().equals("Nimbus")) {
                setLookAndFeel(feel.getClassName());
            }
        }

        JButton second = new JButton("Nimbus");
        content.add(second);

        setLookAndFeel(previous);

        frame.pack();
        frame.setLocationRelativeTo(null);
        frame.setVisible(true);
    }
}

Note, however, that I am unsure regarding the reproducibility of this issue. As quick Google shows no similar issues, it may be something specific to my machine. Regardless, it has persisted when updating from Ubuntu 12 to 13, and 13 to 14. From this I assume it's an issue with Swing and not the underlying system.

The output of the above program is, on my machine,

java.specification.version              1.7
java.version                            1.7.0_51
java.vm.version                         24.51-b03
java.specification.vendor               Oracle Corporation
javax.swing.plaf.metal.MetalLookAndFeel

Using the Metal feel, the resulting window is

Swapping for the GTK feel,

I've been playing around with this for a while now, with no results. Is there something I'm missing? Can anyone reproduce this, and if so is it a bug in the Java distribution or my code? Is there a better way to achieve my goal?

Answer 1

I would have loved to debug this in depth, but a nearing deadline forced me to install the Oracle Java package, which fixed the issue. A disappointing answer, but it did fix the issue permanently.