GTK 4.4 Released With Continued NGL Improvements, Inspector By Default

[Alexmitter]

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

[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.

[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.

[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*

[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.

[chocolate]

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.

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

[brent]

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.

[Shiba]

Are the fonts still broken?

[You-]

"Our GL support works fine with the latest NVidia driver."

It's odd that this is mentioned explicitly and interesting that they say "fine" and not "great".

AFAIK the new driver drops the EGLStreams window system integration to something similar to what upstream were saying around 5-10 years ago which nVidia refused, so this is referring to the "normal" code paths being tested and made to work with the new nVidia drivers.

[uid313]

Is it possible to use GTK 4 with Python GOBject Introspection (GI) yet?

I like GTK and think GTK 4 seems like a nice improvement over GTK 3 which was pretty good but had some things that could be better.