Pango Dropping Support For Bitmap Fonts Is Frustrating Some Linux Desktop Users

[skeevy420]

Michael

The forum software is telling me to quit posting so much and do something else

[Aeder]

I thought context doesn't matter to GNOME guys...

I wouldn't know. I use KDE.

[tildearrow]

Guest Hosny said HiDPI was a better alternative than losing eyesight. It’s pretty arrogant of you to imply anything out of context..

I was about to like that post, until I saw who posted it...

[Zan Lynx]

The idea of using a HiDPI display is just insane considering that the only operating system that handles it well enough for use is MacOS.

I must have been imagining using 4K laptop screens with Fedora since the Dell m3800 which came out in, let's see ... 2014. Or the XPS 15 9560 I replaced it with, also a 4K screen. You'd think if it was unusable I'd have stopped buying those.

Gnome on Fedora has worked extremely well with HiDPI for quite a while. I've also dual booted with Windows and it's worked quite well too. The Lenovo T580 work laptop I use now is running Windows 10 with a 4K display. It's very pretty and works perfectly.

[birdie]

It was yours truly who notified Michael about the regression/removed feature but this time around he chose not to mention me. It's a bit sad however at least the issue has attracted quite a lot of attention after this news. Also after I left a slightly caustic and angry remark, Fedora developers at least decided to convert bitmap fonts to the format which is understood by the new Pango and some even proposed to downgrade Pango to the previous sane release.

Anyways, it's a major cock-up which again shows how little open source developers care about their users and the success of Linux on the desktop.

[Guest]

I must have been imagining using 4K laptop screens with Fedora since the Dell m3800 which came out in, let's see ... 2014. Or the XPS 15 9560 I replaced it with, also a 4K screen. You'd think if it was unusable I'd have stopped buying those.

Gnome on Fedora has worked extremely well with HiDPI for quite a while. I've also dual booted with Windows and it's worked quite well too. The Lenovo T580 work laptop I use now is running Windows 10 with a 4K display. It's very pretty and works perfectly.

I've seen people struggle a lot simply because they have a HiDPI laptop display and just a 1080p external monitor. Scaling of this sort doesn't work well in GNOME. Not to mention, this is a HUGE load on your GPU, you'll probably end up getting as much real estate as you'd get with a 1080p panel once you start scaling it, or you decide to go with fonts too tiny to be readable.

As for Windows 10, I'd say using ANY scaling causes everything to induce vomiting. Even Microsoft's system software (like the service manager among other things) scales very poorly, and having bad non-integer scaling of old low-res software just adds to the inconsistent UI of Windows 10.

Oh, and if that laptop display has touch support (or is simply glossy), the experience is just garbage. Once you go matte, there's no going back.

[carewolf]

You can disable anti-aliasing with vector font rendering, so that's not really a problem then.

That looks like shit unless the font is hand hinted, which is basically just a harder more time consuming version of being hand pixel drawn.

[torsionbar28]

I must have been imagining using 4K laptop screens with Fedora since the Dell m3800 which came out in, let's see ... 2014. Or the XPS 15 9560 I replaced it with, also a 4K screen. You'd think if it was unusable I'd have stopped buying those.

Gnome on Fedora has worked extremely well with HiDPI for quite a while. I've also dual booted with Windows and it's worked quite well too. The Lenovo T580 work laptop I use now is running Windows 10 with a 4K display. It's very pretty and works perfectly.

What's the benefit of 4k on a laptop screen? I'm genuinely curious. Seems like on a screen that size, 1080p would be more than adequate.

[Zan Lynx]

What's the benefit of 4k on a laptop screen? I'm genuinely curious. Seems like on a screen that size, 1080p would be more than adequate.

The text smoothness is amazing. And if you do Gnome's shell overview you can actually read what's in each little window.

At any rate, I don't have to convince anyone else. i like it, and that's enough.