GNOME 42 Beta Released - Begins The UI / Feature / API Freeze, More Apps Ported To GTK4

[brent]

I didn't even know GNOME 42 would retrieve Bluetooth battery status. That's a neat addition, given that Bluetooth is seeing an increase in usage.

Battery status for Bluetooth has been supported for a long time. It's displayed in power settings along with system battery status. So I wonder what changed? Is it displayed in a more prominent place now?

[MrCooper]

If you want, let's talk about how Gnome met the standards in wayland! Those are truly standards that should be respected and which on many occasions have not been.

[citation needed]

[RahulSundaram]

Battery status for Bluetooth has been supported for a long time. It's displayed in power settings along with system battery status. So I wonder what changed? Is it displayed in a more prominent place now?

Yep, it is just more visible.

[user1]

I have a standard 1080p display, so I just tried using both Grayscale and Subpixel font AA and OMG.. The difference is night and day. I really hope subpixel AA won't be dropped in Gnome.

[binarybanana]

I'm sure GTK4 is better in most respects, but it's somewhat concerning that so many apps are getting ported before text rendering is un-broken. There seems to be some false impression that because you can't see individual pixels on a high-DPI screen, the subpixel structure doesn't affect the physical light output. Really, the only kind of screen that there is no good subpixel AA solution for is those WOLED displays where the color plane offsets change based on the pixel color. For all normal displays, where the same subpixel is used for each channel no matter what the other channels are up to, Freetype Harmony should do the right thing.

It'd be such a shame if the Linux desktop got near-perfect text rendering out of the box just a few years ago (with FreeType v40 interpreter, and the switch to slight hinting and lcddefault filter finally becoming the default on non-Ubuntu distros, and RGB antialiasing exposed in gnome-tweaks), only to lose it again now.

Wow, that's sad.
I DON'T want hinting? I DON'T want sharp text? I DON'T still have a bunch of low/medium DPI monitors? How the fuck do they know fhat I want or what gear I have.
But hey, at least this crap renders at 9001FPS now.
What a bunch of clowns. Especially that "OS designer" prick. Pure madness.

[mppix]

To add more detail now that I have time, in case the above comes off as an attempt at trolling:

• The GTK4 developers committed to rendering text using a texture atlas approach.
• That approach doesn't work well with subpixel rendering.
• They then claimed that the problem was with subpixel rendering, not with their approach.

What's the problem in bullet point 2?

It's only too complex because they committed to a bad design in the first place: glyph caching. GPU rasterisers like Pathfinder are basically made for this problem. They can render text at any transform, even perspective transforms, all with subpixel antialiasing done correctly, i.e. in screen space, not than in glyph cache space where the purported MR tries to do it, and is consequently rejected. This is why that MR is going nowhere.

Not only does GTK4 do a worse job that Pathfinder at supporting arbitrary transforms, they also do a worse job than FreeType at supporting pixel-grid aligned text. FreeType has a sophisticated hinting engine, which GTK4 just rounds to a 1/4 of a pixel, because they only cache 1/4 subpixel positions. All this is despite the fact that almost all the text users will actually be reading is pixel-grid aligned.

In a nutshell, they reinvented the wheel, twice, badly.

All of the rebuttals against subpixel antialiasing in that thread essentially fall into a few categories, all of them invalid:

• Google Chrome developer syndrome - throwing resources at a problem to make it go away, in this case HiDPI screens. (1, 2)
• Apple and/or Google's don't do it any more! (1, 9, 10)
• Design limitations. (1, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8)

Point 7 is the exception. It fall into the category of "we'd have to add a setting for that".

I don't know if I understand this.
Pathfinder intends to do what FreeType does, just on GPU. It is under heavy development and nowhere near ready for use in a DE.
Gnome _uses_ FreeType. https://developer.gnome.org/document...libraries.html

Anyhow, complex font aliasing is on its way out on all platforms.
It triples/quadruples the effective pixels to manage. And people will use 8k+ multi-monitor setups during GTK4's life.

[mppix]

Some points there are even more brilliant.
* "Most modern monitors are high DPI" (no prooflink of course)
* "GTK4 supports rotating text" - oh I can only guess the ginormous amount of users who rotate their text on a daily basis and can't live without their simple stupid file browser rotated...

Both statements should hold up reasonably well.
For the latter, people tend to rotate screens quite regularly for all sorts of reasons (openminded?)

[mppix]

I have a standard 1080p display, so I just tried using both Grayscale and Subpixel font AA and OMG.. The difference is night and day. I really hope subpixel AA won't be dropped in Gnome.

GTK3 and GTK4 rendering is not the same. GTK4 with cairo >1.17.4 does subpixel positioning.

There is some drama to this

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

I actually prefer grayscale AA (I cannot stand the rainbow effects of subpixel AA).

However, Gnome would need a new font family (even if it is IBM PLEX). The old(er) fonts just don't work well and that contributes to this discussion quite a bit.

[openminded]

Both statements should hold up reasonably well.
For the latter, people tend to rotate screens quite regularly for all sorts of reasons (openminded?)

Yeah maybe too openminded for you to understand...
Fun fact: the amount of monitors using regular landscape position is way bigger than those with vertical orientation. That's out of blue right?
What you're defending is "let's break well-established setups used by most regular folks to support rare cases used by minor number of professionals because we're too lazy to do it properly instead. Apple does it, we want be like Apple, we can't though but we want it so much let's pretend we're Apple".

[ⲣⲂaggins]

Pathfinder intends to do what FreeType does, just on GPU. It is under heavy development and nowhere near ready for use in a DE.

That's what Pathfinder says about itself. The reality is that it's more or less ceased development. So indeed not all of its functionality is there - not all SVG filters, for example. But the basic rasteriser needed for font rendering should be all there, and perfectly usable in a DE.

Gnome _uses_ FreeType. https://developer.gnome.org/document...libraries.html

Sure, but they don't use its hinting capabilities. For them, the fact that GTK might want to sometimes display text rotated at angle (which precludes the use of hinting) means that they can never use hinting. Even though it would have massive benefits for 99.9% of the text you actually see, and they could certainly find a way to active it only for pixel-grid aligned text if they wanted to. it sounds like a case of developers being so focused on the cool feature they're working on (scenegraphs, animations, transforms) that they forget what it's actually all about (legible text).

It triples/quadruples the effective pixels to manage.

Not a problem if your rasteriser is more than 3/4 times as fast, and also well worth the extra time.