GTK 4.4 Released With Continued NGL Improvements, Inspector By Default

[AHOY]

Easy comparison for the lazy (I feel you). Taken from that thread.

There's probably some joke about that 4.2.0 and stoner vision but it's just not funny anymore. The joke is the toolkit itself and making floss look bad the punchline. Hurts me deeply as there are so many good things people around the GNOME project releases. At this point I just wait for a new toolkit or a Qt fork to evangelize. I'd even learn how to make apps and donate even more than I already do.

[reba]

Yeah, text rendering is a major issue, unless you got a HiDPI display. Basically, GTK 4 is stuck in an idealized "perfect scalable layout" world: text rendering is always grayscale only and with no hinting or grid-fitting whatsoever. It's actually worse than the status quo, not even the line height seems to be grid-fitted. It's fine if you have 200+ DPI screens, but the reality is... we still have MANY low-ish DPI screens and they will not go away any time soon. And on those screens, it's a quite blurry and badly readable experience. But at least it's fast to render and easy to implement (sigh). And here's the ugly, the motivation for this "perfect layout" thing is GOOD: getting rid of grid-fitting in some cases (e.g. horizontal advance) can really improve the quality, you finally can get proper letter spacing for instance. But GTK 4 is simply too forceful, goes all-in on the concept and ignores reality.

The reality is of course complex: different rendering preferences are required, depending on usage. If you want to animate text, you can't use any grid-fitting or hinting. On the other hand, if you want legible, sharp text on low-DPI screens, you need *some* hinting, grid-fitting and subpixel rendering.

The whole thing is being discusse at https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/3787. Improvements are going to come, but the stubbornness of some developers is mind-boggling...

End of rant.

Clear, crisp fonts are essential for user interaction. Imagine only being able to listen to distored audio on your youtube. Terrible.

GNOME once again pulls down the image of Linux as a whole.
GNOME is again and again harming the Linux ecosystem and the Linux desktop acceptance.

It is time to ditch it from distributions and at least make it non-default.
Project management and project goals at their worst.
In the meantime I get the impression they are hired by somebody to destroy Linux and its image for the average Joe.

I could not stand to have to read these blurry fonts and destroy my eyesight because some asshat dev thought hinting is so '90s so we roll back all what hinting was invented for: clear, crisp fonts to what was before hinting was invented: stupid subpixel antialiasing.
*headshaking*

[gedgon]

Yeah, text rendering is a major issue, unless you got a HiDPI display.

Really HiDPI. It's clearly a regression on my ~163 PPI screen.

Improvements are going to come, but the stubbornness of some developers is mind-boggling...

And this is unfortunately, the biggest GNOME/GTK issue of all, and I presume, the source of the hate.

[AHOY]

https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/3787

Checking the issue now and I had to read this gem. "Sorry my memory is blurry". They are trolling. 100%.

In the meantime I get the impression they are hired by somebody to destroy Linux and its image for the average Joe.

I'm offering 1 BT for anyone who can prove they are funded by lizard people.

[Alexmitter]

It seems we have lots of skilled toolkit and especially font rendering experts here, very valuable people.

[arQon]

Easy comparison for the lazy (I feel you).

Ouch. Yeah, that's impressively bad.

Fortunately, GNOME's #1 fanboy has arrived in the thread to save the day. Not by admitting that it's a trainwreck, of course, but by blaming everyone else.

[billyswong]

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

[chocolate]

Ouch. Yeah, that's impressively bad.

Fortunately, GNOME's #1 fanboy has arrived in the thread to save the day. Not by admitting that it's a trainwreck, of course, but by blaming everyone else.

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.

[chocolate]

It seems we have lots of skilled toolkit and especially font rendering experts here, very valuable people.

This is the same gaslighting that is going on in issue threads. You know, it doesn't take a "font rendering expert" to compare two images side by side.
Where did the "let's not hide problems" from the original Debian Manifesto go? Once upon a time, "community" was all about that. Now, you should apologize for potentially offending a volunteer, even if that's not your intention at all. Is there no commitment to users' well-being? Is that the message here? A ubiquitous piece of technology must push forward even if it means regressing an important usecase because "the doers decide"? And half a grain of accountability is dug up only after the fact and there isn't a tenth of an apology because, after all, it's volunteer work?

[aufkrawall]

It seems we have lots of skilled toolkit and especially font rendering experts here, very valuable people.

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.