KDE Plasma Now Uses Slight RGB Hinting By Default For Better Fonts

[R41N3R]

Hm. I'm still waiting for this to be fixed:

https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=387313
https://phabricator.kde.org/T10530

Looks like all movement has stopped on that.

Yes, this is my main pain point on Wayland too. Now Firefox works quite ok on Wayland and because of these rendering issues it looks often quite bad. Kwin needs desperately some attention by the devs!

[shmerl]

Yes, this is my main pain point on Wayland too. Now Firefox works quite ok on Wayland and because of these rendering issues it looks often quite bad. Kwin needs desperately some attention by the devs!

I have a feeling KWin development slowed down a lot lately. Seems like no one is focused on actually moving it forward. Probably not accidentally, Martin stepped down as the primary developer. May be they didn't find anyone else to fill the role? KWin needs more push to use Vulkan, Wayland and etc. Other modern features like Freesync aren't even on the roadmap yet.

[Grogan]

I hate it when desktop environments override my configured font defaults. I set up the symlinks in /etc/fonts/conf.d so that it's consistent everywhere. KDE at least lets you just use vendor defaults/system defaults but some desktops, like XFCE, insist on overriding. If you disable it, it actually reverts back to no antialiasing or hinting and the fonts are misshapen and ugly. At least it's not plunking down .fonts.conf or .config/fontconfig/fonts.conf anymore, it's doing it in its own xsettings.xml file now.

I also made the mistake of installing LXDE because I wanted to see how it has improved after some years. Configuring its settings overwrote my ~/.gtkrc-2.0 and ~/.config/gtk-3.0/settings.xml files, for consistency I guess, it doesn't actually use gtk 3. It took me a bit to figure out what it did, as those are my own hand edited files and I didn't expect anything to overwrite them. (e.g. XFCE sources its own copies of those settings).

In any distro I always recompile my freetype with FT_CONFIG_OPTION_SUBPIXEL_RENDERING defined, which means I want to use lcd filtering and I don't appreciate desktop environments overriding what I've configured system wide.

In Plasma, "vendor default" was the default, which is what I would want. It sounds like they are enabling their overrides by default now. Also, an excellent point was made by carewolf, while most displays (including mine) want RGB not all do. Test here (image to compare lines): http://www.lagom.nl/lcd-test/subpixel.php

Fonts are something I'm extremely fussy about. Not only TTF font rendering, but my console and x terminals have to be using the right fonts or I can't stand it.

[Slartifartblast]

"The Dolphin file manager when already running and is called upon to display a new folder, it will do so in a new tab rather than new window."

Please no. I hope this can be disabled.

Seconded, I have multi monitors.

[polarathene]

Fonts are something I'm extremely fussy about. Not only TTF font rendering, but my console and x terminals have to be using the right fonts or I can't stand it.

Does Wayland support different rendering per display? You want lcd/rgb hinting for your regular 1080p like screens but anything HiDPI is generally better with grayscale iirc. macOS at one point allowed adjusting the font hinting in browsers for website via CSS, you could change it on per text basis not just the site which was interesting. They've since removed support for that and only support grayscale so CSS can't be used to adjust text based on DPI of the display with media queries anymore, Apple only wants you using HiDPI displays.

I assume it's a given for X11 and not sure about Wayland regarding using appropriate hinting per display. Some android displays take pixel arrangements further with a type of diamond or hex arrangement I think? Can't recall the name, it's on wikipedia, something like pentile perhaps. They did such so that whatever orientation you use, the content wouldn't suffer a certain orientation degrading the quality.

[polarathene]

Seconded, I have multi monitors.

Multi-monitors isn't so bad, there are a few users like me who chimed in on the related KDE reddit thread regarding virtual desktop use.

I've got 10 vdesktops atm, where I organize windows/apps based on topic/projects I'm working with. I can have multiple Dolphin windows open. I don't want one of those windows moving to my current vdesktop, being switched over to a vdesktop that it decided to open the tab in, or it silently opening on one of those windows and me having to play hide'n'seek.

Ideally if there isn't a Dolphin window on my current vdesktop, it should open a new window, if that's not an option, being switched to the vdesktop out of the 3 possible scenarios would be the least frustrating. You'd hope they'd enable a way to disable it though if the behaviour isn't satisfactory. These days though, some KDE devs seem to express a disinterest in providing more configuration options, fingers crossed.

[polarathene]

Kwin needs desperately some attention by the devs!

I have a feeling KWin development slowed down a lot lately. Seems like no one is focused on actually moving it forward. KWin needs more push to use Vulkan, Wayland and etc. Other modern features like Freesync aren't even on the roadmap yet.

I wonder how replaceable Kwin is, with reasonable feature parity(iirc it has some KDE specific stuff). AFAIK, it's a pretty big codebase, so expecting any rewrites/ports is perhaps unlikely? Or can an existing compositor for Wayland at the very least be leveraged with the KDE specifics added on so it can be a drop-in Kwin replacement?

I was thinking that with Wayland, we'd see more of a base compositor with extensions/plugins for anything that's not common/useful to all DEs compositing needs. I think wlroots is meant to be taking that approach? Yet Mutter and Kwin codebases understandably only want to maintain a single compositor for both X11 and Wayland and try to carry over feature parity.

[shmerl]

I wonder how replaceable Kwin is, with reasonable feature parity(iirc it has some KDE specific stuff). AFAIK, it's a pretty big codebase, so expecting any rewrites/ports is perhaps unlikely? Or can an existing compositor for Wayland at the very least be leveraged with the KDE specifics added on so it can be a drop-in Kwin replacement?

I was thinking that with Wayland, we'd see more of a base compositor with extensions/plugins for anything that's not common/useful to all DEs compositing needs. I think wlroots is meant to be taking that approach? Yet Mutter and Kwin codebases understandably only want to maintain a single compositor for both X11 and Wayland and try to carry over feature parity.

wlroots aims to be a general purpose compositor base, but not sure how replaceable are KWin parts with it.

https://github.com/swaywm/wlroots

[Grogan]

Does Wayland support different rendering per display?

I'm sorry, but I can't answer. I don't know much about Wayland (dinosaur here lol). I use X11 and single displays, mostly ordinary 1080p lcd screens but I have older square 1280x1024 too. I don't even use compositing anymore, it's a fun novelty for a bit but I don't really like that. I prefer a nice snappy window manager anyway. Browsers are a different story, I'm using webrender with Firefox.

[ngraham]

For people wondering about the font rendering thing, we actually fixed the bug that was *preventing* it from reading distro-provided defaults. So now we actually to respect those. And if the distro doesn't set anything, we default to slight RGB hinting as a best guess/sane enough default.