GTK 4.4 Released With Continued NGL Improvements, Inspector By Default

[AHOY]

Another image sample from the bug ticket in case @chocolate's example is not clear enough:

[billyswong]

It's very simple: Grayscale font AA is a lost cause. Put your efforts into achieving proper subpixel font AA or just stop doing anything at all.
Everyone should have learned this by looking at Microsoft's ridiculous ModernUI Frankenstein.

The stupidity is, some people act like their favourite Apple-style glyph rendering is all okay as long as one use a hiDPI display. But if one really use a hiDPI display with 200+dpi, it is even more okay to do no AA. The only place that make a tiny bit of sense for their grayscale AA + subpixel positioning is for text animation + transformation, a very niche use case that shouldn't accommodate to in expense of the 99.9999% major text rendering scenario.

Another stupidity is, some people act like "don't complain if you can't fix it yourself" is a valid response for all bugs. Such altitude may be credible for old bugs and feature requests, but irresponsible for regressions. It is perfectly credible for any layman to complain to intentional bug maker, such as this glyph rendering case.

[ssokolow]

It's very simple: Grayscale font AA is a lost cause. Put your efforts into achieving proper subpixel font AA or just stop doing anything at all.
Everyone should have learned this by looking at Microsoft's ridiculous ModernUI Frankenstein.

Translation: Continue to incrementally migrate your desktop from GTK to Qt to ignore the whims of people unwilling to step up and buy new hardware for all the people they're actively inconveniencing.

OK, I will. (I've already kicked almost all GTK software off my system just as a result of replacing applications as soon as they switch to header bars. Audacious Media Player is one of the last things left, and only because, while they are migrating from GTK to Qt, they haven't reimplemented global hotkeys on the Qt side yet and that's my main means of interacting with it.)

[Vistaus]

*insert mandatory complain about filepicker here*

*insert mandatory flamewar between GTK and Qt here*

[finalzone]

Translation: Continue to incrementally migrate your desktop from GTK to Qt to ignore the whims of people unwilling to step up and buy new hardware for all the people they're actively inconveniencing.

OK, I will. (I've already kicked almost all GTK software off my system just as a result of replacing applications as soon as they switch to header bars. Audacious Media Player is one of the last things left, and only because, while they are migrating from GTK to Qt, they haven't reimplemented global hotkeys on the Qt side yet and that's my main means of interacting with it.)

Let's make a noise about switching to another toolkit because...

[Vistaus]

It's bad, yes, but let's not turn this into a flamewar as almost always happens in GNOME and KDE threads. Aren't we just a bunch of blind people throwing stones at each other?

Fact is, someone doing volunteer work for which you should be unconditionally grateful does not want you to call such a problem a "bug" or a "regression". So you're deprived of the only useful terms to describe such a thing from the get-go. And the tone they use to do that is nothing short of lapidary.
How should the discussion go forward? How can it be considered inclusive and welcoming? Somewhat of a rhetorical question, but I honestly don't know what the expectation is.

Then there's the intellectual dishonesty of not acknowledging the new renderer made it into final, released software in users' computers while not being able to actually render glyphs that the previous renderer handled just fine (billyswong's comment).

One can appreciate the GNOME ecosystem, the apps, the interface guidelines, the achievements of GTK and libadwaita, all the beautiful things... but there is just no commitment to a well-defined set of goals and no accountability whatsoever.
This is the toolkit powering the "standard" enterprise desktop and you're expected to be sorry for bringing these problems up to the volunteers, as if you shouldn't dare annoy them with your real-world scenarios and usecases. Luckily, this is too big to just shield away from an individual's infantile, concealed idea of code purity, which is what I imagine is going on.

Talk about these things? The place is "hostile". Ask something on their GitLab and there's no response ready? The discussion is "heated". Reminds me of another kind of garden decoration.

I get that they are mostly a bunch of volunteers, but there are quite a few volunteers around and readibility should be a top priority. If you can't read text, then how are you supposed to use it? So IMHO, even if they are limited to volunteers, they should allocate more volunteers to work on making text readable.

[Vistaus]

Another stupidity is, some people act like "don't complain if you can't fix it yourself" is a valid response for all bugs.

I always hate when people say that. Imagine if that were common place:

Doctor: “Don't complain about your broken leg if you can't put a cast on it yourself!!!”
Garage: “Don't complain about your brakes not working if you can't fix them yourself!!!”
Government: “Don't complain about your house being destroyed by an uncommon hurricane/tsunami/flood if you can't fix it yourself!!!”

[reba]

I always hate when people say that. Imagine if that were common place:

Doctor: “Don't complain about your broken leg if you can't put a cast on it yourself!!!”
Garage: “Don't complain about your brakes not working if you can't fix them yourself!!!”
Government: “Don't complain about your house being destroyed by an uncommon hurricane/tsunami/flood if you can't fix it yourself!!!”

In this case it's more like:

"Don't complain about the hole I shot through your eye if you can't fix it yourself."

[grok]

wow
WTF
Font rendering has always been great on GTK2 and GTK3, even in grayscale which you need when your monitor doesn't have subpixels. The hinting setting was there.
So the fix is, use GTK2 and GTK3 software.
Perhaps Debian 11 has no GTK4 software?
I won't mind if some things switch to GTK4, e.g. Gnome headerbar stuff. Why? Because I find these good enough as "applets" such as the calculator. Try calculator, Maps, games on a normal desktop. It's ok. You get to keep the menu bar and title bar on everything else.

A big thank you to those of you who are grinding your teeth and nails while either this will be fixed before I suffer it or I will be able to ignore it.

[onlyLinuxLuvUBack]

My eyesight is going bad is there a difference in the images ?
Wont increasing the font size fix any issue?