A Brief Look At Fedora 24

[renkin]

Ericg Did you install the runtime for the LibreOffice flatpak? I followed the instructions on their website and it works for me on F23. Or maybe they just updated their flatpak, idk.

[Ericg]

Ericg Did you install the runtime for the LibreOffice flatpak? I followed the instructions on their website and it works for me on F23. Or maybe they just updated their flatpak, idk.

Fedora 24 here

[egriffith@eric-laptop ~]$ flatpak update --user org.libreoffice.LibreOffice
Updating application org.libreoffice.LibreOffice fresh

1 metadata, 0 content objects fetched; 569 B transferred in 1 seconds

[egriffith@eric-laptop ~]$ flatpak run -v org.libreoffice.LibreOffice
XA: Allowing host-fs access
XA: Allowing x11 access
XA: Allowing wayland access
XA: Allowing pulseaudio access
XA: Allowing session-dbus access
XA: Allowing system-dbus access
error: Unable to start app
[egriffith@eric-laptop ~]$

[mudig]

Disclaimer: I'm the maintainer of cantarell and the driving force behind the freetype and font configuration changes.

I'm excited all of this finally lands freetype on Fedora won't do subpixel rendering because the patent expires 2018 iirc, use the freeworld package. Slight is the best choice because it delivers a good compromise between design and sharpness while preserving inter-glyph spacing, regardless of font format. The result is a harmonious look across fonts and of text all that's missing in unixoid font rendering is alpha blending and gamma correction (GTK/cairo I'm looking at you) and a stem darkening API in freetype.

PS: look forward to a better "full hinting" mode in the next ft release that will deliver approximately directwrite-looking results.

[Ericg]

Disclaimer: I'm the maintainer of cantarell and the driving force behind the freetype and font configuration changes.

I'm excited all of this finally lands freetype on Fedora won't do subpixel rendering because the patent expires 2018 iirc, use the freeworld package. Slight is the best choice because it delivers a good compromise between design and sharpness while preserving inter-glyph spacing, regardless of font format. The result is a harmonious look across fonts and of text all that's missing in unixoid font rendering is alpha blending and gamma correction (GTK/cairo I'm looking at you) and a stem darkening API in freetype.

PS: look forward to a better "full hinting" mode in the next ft release that will deliver approximately directwrite-looking results.

Interesting. mudig, if you have a blog, could you detail these changes / wishlist items? I'm not a typography expert, but the subject does interest me (as I'm sure it does others). I'd love to read about this kind of upcoming work and the rational / the effects of individual changes.

[bjoswald]

Disclaimer: I'm the maintainer of cantarell and the driving force behind the freetype and font configuration changes.

I'm excited all of this finally lands freetype on Fedora won't do subpixel rendering because the patent expires 2018 iirc, use the freeworld package. Slight is the best choice because it delivers a good compromise between design and sharpness while preserving inter-glyph spacing, regardless of font format. The result is a harmonious look across fonts and of text all that's missing in unixoid font rendering is alpha blending and gamma correction (GTK/cairo I'm looking at you) and a stem darkening API in freetype.

PS: look forward to a better "full hinting" mode in the next ft release that will deliver approximately directwrite-looking results.

So does this mean we still need to copy the lcddefault filter over or can we skip it from now on?

[mudig]

Copy it in fontconfig, cairo will use an old LCD Filter otherwise and look horrible.

[boxie]

I don't know if the KDE folks have forgiven me for last year's debacle But I'll look into it, I've got a spare 16GB ssd in this laptop that I keep for testing different distros.

well, don't rest on those laurels... give them something else to not forgive you about Constructive criticism and all that

[renkin]

Ericg funnily enough, there was a packaging mix-up and the libs weren't installed with the flatpak rpm. You also had to install flatpak-libs. It's fixed now though.

https://plus.google.com/115250422803614415116/posts/BueHvwEnxU4

[gilboa]

Animations being smoother is probably thanks to wayland, another nice thing about wayland is that it hugely decreases the odds of tearing. (Pretty much any graphics I use on X will tear X a new asshole unless I make some major tweaks to it, which often involves a compositor with vsync, and it never fully solves the problem)

I noticed this too when I played around with wayland, it was smoother than any display server experience I have ever had (on any operating system) kinda excited to give KDE a second chance after it's ported to wayland. I don't have the technical knowledge to explain exactly how wayland reduces tearing and how it makes animations smoother (I think it was more that X and DRI always managed to fuck them up rather than wayland actually making them smoother, but it just has to do with how wayland outputs pixels on the screen differently than X) Wayland also has an easier time displaying more frames per second than X I would imagine, (more smooth frames certainly, X seems to kinda freak out whenever things are happening too fast).

Anyhow, gnome wayland is the default on fedora now? thought it wouldn't be ready for like another half a year at least (probably full year!) what happened? Did they decide to use it in spite of a few missing features such as remote desktop and such? This is big news.

Unlike X, which has no concept of "frame", hence, its has no way to prevent tearing.
Wayland on the other hand was designed to deliver perfect frames (hence Wayland motto "Every frame is perfect").

- Gilboa

[gilboa]

@Ericg.

Thanks for the writeup.