GTK 4.14 To Provide Crisper Font Rendering, Better Fractional Scaling

[McCarthee]

I have to admit that MacOS have extremely good font rendering, and have had for many years. I'm not sure exactly what they are doing, but it looks noticeably better than any windows or linux installation I've seen so far. So I'd say it is solved, do that Apple does and you're good. I'm no Apple fan by any means, but this one thing they got nailed down really well!

It helps that their devices have very high dpi displays.

[billyswong]

Still sounds like preferences and philosophies. BTW I use Debian testing with GNOME 45 grayscale (non-subpixel) AA without hinting all day long on a couple of 32" 4k screen running native res without problem which works formy eyes and preferences. I find Windows CT font rendering to be way to jagged and fringed to be enjoyable.

If you are running a 32" 4k screen, you are in the HiDPI club already, even though it is not the Apple Retina grade.

A true old-school DPI 32" monitor can only handle at most 1440p resolution, or the even older 2560x1600 format provided by dual-link DVI.

Colour fringing of Cleartype/subpixel AA is usually due to a lot of monitors don't respect sRGB gamma curve but do their own thing to impress viewers with brighter and more saturated images.

[oleid]

Yeah. Wayland doesn't handle text rendering at all. It just passes images around.

That's not really different on X11 these days when using GTK3 or later, Qt4 or later or other recent toolkits.

[hf_139]

RedHat employeee GNOME devs made it clear two years ago, that the washed-out ugly font rendering was deliberate and perfection.

So no 6 page long discussion needed. The gods have spoken.

[chocolate]

I have to admit that MacOS have extremely good font rendering, and have had for many years. I'm not sure exactly what they are doing, but it looks noticeably better than any windows or linux installation I've seen so far. So I'd say it is solved, do that Apple does and you're good. I'm no Apple fan by any means, but this one thing they got nailed down really well!

Not sure if this was meant as sarcasm, and I see that the dead horse has been beaten to a pulp by others already, but: that's not my case at all on a 1440p 27" BenQ that I chose due to its eyesight-protecting properties and that works just fine with a Linux PC. I have an M1 Mac Studio connected to it as well, with the latest macOS updates, and wow is it absolutely atrocious how blurry it is. Not even GTK4 apps on Linux are that blurry compared to the pixel-perfect fonts I use for everything that supports them, more recently Spleen in particular. But generic fonts in Linux distributions that haven't gone full GTK4 yet, I find okay. I didn't even need the Mac for work or anything; I wanted to test my own stuff on macOS and now I regret it... costly toy with very little value for a programmer outside of using it as a compilation target.

It's a real pity GTK4 came out the way it is, since libadwaita apps have popped up like fungi on Flathub and many hit a sweet spot for a specific need, and their adaptiveness makes them behave well in a tiling environment. I understand the developers' reasoning but do not agree with it in the slightest.

Edited to add: in the future I'll go for a 5K 27" since I think it would be perfect for the desktop at native resolution while theoretically working well with videogames at half resolution via integer scaling, since I think 1440p will remain an optimal compromise between performance, thermals and so on. Apple excluded, suggestions welcome! ...

[avis]

I have to admit that MacOS have extremely good font rendering, and have had for many years. I'm not sure exactly what they are doing, but it looks noticeably better than any windows or linux installation I've seen so far. So I'd say it is solved, do that Apple does and you're good. I'm no Apple fan by any means, but this one thing they got nailed down really well!

MacOS has always had the absolute worst font rendering of any OS I've ever used. It's become OKish with high DPI screens but before that it was literally painful to look at.