Look and feel problems in Ubuntu 18.04

On Ubuntu 18.04, I had difficulties using Jabref 4.3.1. The ‘Appearance’ menu is missing the usual ‘GTK’ option, and the other options don’t look good – eg the text highlighting makes it hard to see icons/text. Did anyone else see this problem?

Note that I used the .jar package from the Jabref download page for this.

Edit: note, I found that I can hand-type the gtk.GTKLookAndFeel and it works. But for some reason that option doesn’t appear in the dropdown menu. Also, even though the GTK look and feel launches, it seems that the program is prone to crash with that setting on.

We removed the GTK look and feel because many users reported issues when it was activated. The latest development version goes even a step further and removes look and feels completely. Instead, we use a modern UI technology, which should give a consistent style across all OS. You can try out the new version from https://builds.jabref.org/master/ (please make a back-up of your library before you update).