The Very Exciting GNOME 3.12 Has Been Released

[Bucic]

Font rendering is a personal preference. Pretending as if your opinions are universal doesn't help with the conversation at all. "Better" is subjective. Learn to accept that.

First he needs to comprehend that font rendering is not dependant on desktop environment.

Yeah, because tons of linux users need hidpi support. Real game changer here.

You don't know what you're talking about. Desktops are backward, years behind display technology. They become barely usable at as low as 130 ppi of the display. And 130 ppi is e.g. 1680x1050 15 inch display. 1080p (1920x1080) at 15 inches is even higher ppi.

[Aleve Sicofante]

Font rendering is a personal preference. Pretending as if your opinions are universal doesn't help with the conversation at all. "Better" is subjective. Learn to accept that.

Telling people to "learn to accept that" or that their opinions are silly on the other hand really helps with the conversation...

No, better font rendering is not subjective. Besides personal preference (this or that algorithm) there's an objective goal regarding font rendering. Every demo of Gnome shows it's not making that goal. Period. You can explain that by resorting to patent encumbered algorithms (patents that apply mostly to the US and a few other countries only) and that sort of thing. Just saying "it's subjective" is, besides a very poor excuse, beyond silly.

[Aleve Sicofante]

First he needs to comprehend that font rendering is not dependant on desktop environment.

Maybe you need to learn to read English. I already explained why that doesn't matter. GNOME devs can choose to show their demos with proper font rendering or the disaster they choose to show. Try again.

[molecule-eye]

You don't know what you're talking about. Desktops are backward, years behind display technology. They become barely usable at as low as 130 ppi of the display. And 130 ppi is e.g. 1680x1050 15 inch display. 1080p (1920x1080) at 15 inches is even higher ppi.

Why did you quote me and then respond with that? It's not even relevant. I said not a lot of linux users are using hidpi monitors and need scaling. Now, I didn't go out and survey linux users, so I was just guessing, but it seems like a pretty sure bet. I would guess that most linux users with hidpi monitors are developers trying to get hidpi support working! At any rate, 'not a lot' is a relative term, and even if--according to you--there were more than 'not a lot' of linux users using hidpi monitors, hidpi support would still not be a game changer for a linux DE. Really, was THAT controversial?!

[RahulSundaram]

Telling people to "learn to accept that" or that their opinions are silly on the other hand really helps with the conversation...

I told you to accept your opinions as merely your own preferences. What I called silly is you implying that font rendering is based on the desktop environment.

No, better font rendering is not subjective. Besides personal preference (this or that algorithm) there's an objective goal regarding font rendering

Objective according to whom? Feel free to provide real citations. You have failed to demonstrate that the demo videos have any such objectively bad font encoding. It is clearly a personal preference as there are people even within this thread who have said that the video has good font rendering. You also should be aware that the patent explanation is not applicable anymore since the applicable patents (most commonly cited) for hinting have expired and the distributions including Fedora have re-enabled the previously patented algorithms for hinting by default.

[Bucic]

Why did you quote me and then respond with that? It's not even relevant. I said not a lot of linux users are using hidpi monitors and need scaling. Now, I didn't go out and survey linux users, so I was just guessing, but it seems like a pretty sure bet. I would guess that most linux users with hidpi monitors are developers trying to get hidpi support working! At any rate, 'not a lot' is a relative term, and even if--according to you--there were more than 'not a lot' of linux users using hidpi monitors, hidpi support would still not be a game changer for a linux DE. Really, was THAT controversial?!

Because the fact that 130 ppi laptop displays are not uncommon doesn't get through to you.

[molecule-eye]

Because the fact that 130 ppi laptop displays are not uncommon doesn't get through to you.

Not when stated in some convoluted way. But if that's what were you trying to say, then I get it. However, it hadn't actually occurred to me that someone with a less than 1080p display on a 15" notebook would make use of scaling. Or that people who buy laptops with 1080p screens would ever want to make use of scaling besides just increasing font sizes (which any DE can do). I was just thinking of people who are scaling REAL hidpi displays, like "retina"-grade ones.

[Awesomeness]

I seriously hope not. I think it's dormant since the XFCE devs are not thinking about reinventing the entire interface with each version.

They don't need to reinvent themselves but how about getting their port away from legacy technologies (GTK2 etc.) done? The situation is currently so bad, the "enterprise-grade" 14.04 LTS release of Xubuntu will ship a snapshot of Xfce's 4.11 development branch because there is simply no new Xfce version since 2012!

The LXDE port to a whole new toolkit (Qt) makes better progress than Xfce?s port to simply a new version of GTK?

[daedaluz]

They don't need to reinvent themselves but how about getting their port away from legacy technologies (GTK2 etc.) done? The situation is currently so bad, the "enterprise-grade" 14.04 LTS release of Xubuntu will ship a snapshot of Xfce's 4.11 development branch because there is simply no new Xfce version since 2012!

The LXDE port to a whole new toolkit (Qt) makes better progress than Xfce?s port to simply a new version of GTK?

Even Trinity is making more progress than XFCE and that is saying a lot. It indeed appears to be abandonware now. At this point there really are no reasons to use XFCE. At least I can't think of any.

[tuubi]

At this point there really are no reasons to use XFCE. At least I can't think of any.

Well I certainly can. For one, it's an excellent DE. All of the doom-and-gloom about new-fangled features and plumbing it might not support in the future isn't really a good reason to switch away right now. Especially to something that's under heavy refactoring and development. I need my tools to be efficient and functional, not cool and shiny.

I might well have to migrate to something else in the future, but for now Xfce does it's job just fine and all of it's dependencies are still available on modern distributions.