Why do some dialogs in Mint18 draw too small?
 

Like this:

http://gal.redsquirrel.me/thumbs/lrg...ng_dialogs.png


Super annoying. Have to resize it each time just to see all the options.

I've seen it happen in other programs too like Filezilla if you try to cancel an upload the dialog that asks if you are sure draws the buttons cropped so you can't read them, and that one you can't even resize.

Is there a way to fix this globally?

important question:
WHICH dialogs, i.e. which apps generate them?
i suspect a toolkit (e.g. gtk3) problem.

fwiw, this sometimes happens to me too.
i have a hotkey for my window magaer to vertically maximize windows.
but if it happens too often, that would be problematic.

Are you saying that all of your dialog boxes (globally) are missing the frame and other elements?
Usually there's a frame, titlebar and some canvas. I see canvas only in your attachment.

Your sidebar says that you are running Mint 17.1 KDE, but you're talking here about Mint 18. So is it Mint 18 KDE that you're running? The reason I ask is that I've experienced problems with KDE and some Gtk+ applications in the past.

It's very random but if an app does it then it does it all the time for that app/dialog. The one in the example is Audacity. But I've seen it in Filezilla too. If you try to close it while it's transferring files and you get a dialog asking if you're sure, the yes/no buttons are cropped out of the dialog you only see the edge border.

And yes it's 18.

can you resize those dialogs manually (grab corner with mouse, or press a maximize button, or some hotkey combination)?

interestingly, those 2 apps depend on wxgtk, which is a "GTK+ implementation of wxWidgets API for GUI": http://wxwidgets.org/

Yes I can, but I have to do it each time, even within the same session.

This is still an issue. Am I the only one that runs into this? I was hoping it would get fixed in an update at some point. It's really annoying. Worse part is when I resize it never saves so every time that particular dialog gets opened, even within the same session, I have to resize it each time.

I suspect the fault lies, not with Mint, but with the programs that produce these dialogs, as you said in your original post that only some dialogs suffer from this.

As previously mentioned, it would help to know which applications produce these unsatisfactory dialog boxes.

^ Filezilla and Audacity.
Both depend on wxwidgets, that has caused minor problems for me, too, in the past.
OP should research there IMO.

@OP: Close apps, rename all config folders, try again.
For audacity that's ~/.audacity-data. I don't use filezilla.

This only happens in mint. Those programs work fine on other platforms. From a fresh install it will do this too, so it's not something wrong with my actual install, I think it's something wrong with the Implementation. But I wonder if there is some kind of work around or at very least a way to tell it to remember the size so I don't have to keep resizing manually each time.

I'm on Mint 18 which is older now as 19 is out so worse case scenario I might just clean install and use the opportunity to upgrade.

On https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WxWidgets it says:I'll bet this is an example of the "problems" there referred to, and warrants a report to the Audacity and Filezilla developers. That image to me looks like a result of a mixture of em sizing and px sizing in its creation. None of the apps I use depend on wxWidgets.