ReactOS Working On A Community Windows OS

[Nille]

The fragmentation is being largly solved by the migration to Wayland.

The X-Server or Wayland has nothing to do with the problem. Try to integrate your Application in the Desktop, you has to do it for each desktop and distribution. Not even a single Contextmenu entry is a cheap thing. Even in one Application you has a huge amount of fragmentation. e.g. Thunar in Ubuntu has gio Support but the Debian version not.

The Desktops are huge static blobs without a proper way to integrate (Change the Source is not a option) you apps. Even a entry in the Systemsettings can be a mess.

There is no common base.

[egrath]

- Honestly, I can't tell the difference between GTK/Qt programs since they use the same looks if you have Qt properly configured and have all the required GTK engines for your programs.

- I have no idea what you are talking about with font rendering since it is universally the same. Just open up your favourite settings utility, such as Unity Tweak Tool for Unity users, and set your desired font settings here. It certainly looks far better than what Microsoft does -- now that is a disaster.

No it's not. No matter if you have the corresponding themes and engines installed. Take a look at Qt vs. GTK-(2/3). Even if those two are using FreeType as their Rendering Engine, they use it in different ways which result in different results. As an example, install Qt Creator in Ubuntu and run it. Take a look at the Font in the Menus: different Kerning, different Hinting, different LCD Filtering. Even worse is Java which uses it's native Rendering Engine on everything except Windows and doesn't even catch up with Fontconfig settings.

I'm glad to see other FOSS systems coming which aren't Linux based and follow a different approach (speaking ReactOS, speaking Haiku, ...). Don't get me wrong, i love Linux on the server/embedded/mobile/blub but hate it on the desktop.

egrath

[AJSB]

egrath,

YES, i complain about ClearType and related techs used in Window$....in XP was OK but in W7 it started to get bad and in W8.x it feels worse.

I can not stand looking to a screen of a rig running Window$ for more than some hours that my vision starts to go bad....i can do in XP and i can do it in LINUX in special if using XFCE, LINUX with XFCE is , for *me*, the best experience, if i want/need to look to a screen for 10+ hours, i will have no problems doing so and i can see it clearly from begin to end.

In W7/8.x they also have a mess with font sizes/shapes (just like i hate KDE in LINUX because of that)...XFCE in LINUX is so much simpler and better.

*IMHO*, after XP, M$ f++ked up the fonts in Window$ (not to mention color schemes options ) to a point that i hate to use that darn piece of OS...


If it wasn't for any other reason(s), and there are many other, these two are enough to me drop Window$.


This of course, is simply my opinion/experience , YMMV.

[curaga]

- Look and Feel across the Application Landscape. Take a look at the different GUI Toolkits currently in use. Every application written with another toolkit looks a little bit different to the user. Especially the font related stuff - run a Qt,KDE,Java application on Ubuntu and see for yourself that it doesn't look that good.

Several of popular Windows applications look completely different to the common Windows idioms: Chrome, Winamp, Adobe Reader. Java programs look the same on any platform, which is not Windows-like either.

So please explain why this difference is not a problem on Windows, since all mentioned apps have a lot of happy users.

[egrath]

I can not stand looking to a screen of a rig running Window$ for more than some hours that my vision starts to go bad....i can do in XP and i can do it in LINUX in special if using XFCE, LINUX with XFCE is , for *me*, the best experience, if i want/need to look to a screnn for 10+ hours, i will have no problems doing so and i can see it clearly from begin to end.

Yes, font rendering and vision is a totally subjective thing. For me it's the exact opposite, i can't look at any Linux desktop for longer than a hour without getting problems. Hell, i spent weeks (really) trying to make things better with tweaking the font configuration (hinting, filtering, subpixel rendering variations, infinality patches with uncountable configuration variations, ...).

[mmstick]

The X-Server or Wayland has nothing to do with the problem. Try to integrate your Application in the Desktop, you has to do it for each desktop and distribution. Not even a single Contextmenu entry is a cheap thing. Even in one Application you has a huge amount of fragmentation. e.g. Thunar in Ubuntu has gio Support but the Debian version not.

The Desktops are huge static blobs without a proper way to integrate (Change the Source is not a option) you apps. Even a entry in the Systemsettings can be a mess.

There is no common base.

KDE, Unity, and GNOME 3 are doing that pretty well. Where did you get this idea that it isn't? If you want to argue that all Linux distros should be equal, then you are making an argument that is logically flawed.

[egrath]

Several of popular Windows applications look completely different to the common Windows idioms: Chrome, Winamp, Adobe Reader. Java programs look the same on any platform, which is not Windows-like either.

So please explain why this difference is not a problem on Windows, since all mentioned apps have a lot of happy users.

Even if they look different and don't adhere to the visual guidelines given my Microsoft, they at least render the fonts the same way as every other application.

[mmstick]

Yes, font rendering and vision is a totally subjective thing. For me it's the exact opposite, i can't look at any Linux desktop for longer than a hour without getting problems. Hell, i spent weeks (really) trying to make things better with tweaking the font configuration (hinting, filtering, subpixel rendering variations, infinality patches with uncountable configuration variations, ...).

Fonts render best with just RGB and no hinting at all.

[grndzro]

The X-Server or Wayland has nothing to do with the problem. Try to integrate your Application in the Desktop, you has to do it for each desktop and distribution. Not even a single Contextmenu entry is a cheap thing. Even in one Application you has a huge amount of fragmentation. e.g. Thunar in Ubuntu has gio Support but the Debian version not.

The Desktops are huge static blobs without a proper way to integrate (Change the Source is not a option) you apps. Even a entry in the Systemsettings can be a mess.

There is no common base.

So you are saying Wayland will not help the situation.....gotcha.

[egrath]

Fonts render best with just RGB and no hinting at all.

I agree to some point - unhinted fonts with just subpixel rendering have the issue of being very blurry on low resolution displays (e.g. 1080p) if you don't apply additional filters. OS X renders it's fonts in exactly this way but it's renderer does a filtering trick which can't currently accomplised on the Linux Desktop - if you want the best visual result, you have to apply different filters based on the background the font is rendered on. And FreeType doesn't has any clues on the background, it just renders the Glyphs and gives back the result to the callee [as opposed to Cocoa which takes this into account]