GTK 4.4 Released With Continued NGL Improvements, Inspector By Default

[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]

*insert mandatory complain about filepicker here*

*insert mandatory flamewar between GTK and Qt here*

[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.)

[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.

[AHOY]

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

[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.

[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?

[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.

[billyswong]

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

[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.