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Comment by SCdF | Hacker News Reader

I hope we are all somehow misunderstanding how terrible this is.

The idea that they would downgrade the display support so that non-retina monitors--- and let's be serious, that is nearly all monitors that people dock into at work or at home-- are going to look worse in Mojave, is almost too absurd to be true.

I want to see this for myself.

Does anyone know if you can simulate this now, without installing the beta? Or if you can install or somehow use the beta without nuking what you already have?

Edit: I am still on Sierra, because the buzz around High Sierra made it sounds like it was a bad idea to upgrade. This is sounding more and more like Mojave is a no-go as well.

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I fucking hated Lion when I got it on a new MacBook in 2012. I had been running Snow Leopard on my Hackintosh. I decided to buy a new Mac when I went overseas and Lion removed expose and replaced it with that (still) terrible Mission Control garbage. I spent a few weeks trying to downgrade it to 10.6 and it was impossible.

Final Cut X was ... something else. Anyone who claims you just need to get use to is must not like having good tools. It's a terrible video editor and Apple killed off their only pro video tool.

Around that time I just ran Linux in a VM on my Mac and got into tiling window managers. I tried a bunch and liked a lot of the, but eventually settled on i3 (which I still use today). I ran OpenSUSE at work. Someone at work was throwing out an old IBM dual Xeon and that became my primary box and I used my MacBook as a Windows gaming laptop, up until it was stolen:

https://khanism.org/faith/fate-and-destiny/

At my most recent job, I asked for a PC laptop (Dell or HP) and they gave me a terrible MacBook. I run Gentoo on it:

https://penguindreams.org/blog/linux-on-a-macbook-pro-14-3/

but I still hate the hardware and it's more difficult to get Linux on a MacBook than any other x86 laptop I've owned, including two Dells, an HP and an MSI.

I don't want Apple to go away because we do need competition in the market, but their operating system and hardware seriously needs to stop being a pile or poop.

I won't have anything bad said about FCPX. Yes, they botched the launch by releasing an unfinished, beta-quality first version. But every criticism of it was addressed within short order and it's solid as hell now.

The only reason why anyone continues to hate it today is because they're used to the terrible, horrible and stupid way that all the other NLEs work (including FCP6). It can be disconcerting to use FCPX because everything seems like a fancier version of iMovie, that it therefore must be not for "pros" or it's missing lots of "pro" features.

But it's not. Terrible, horrible and stupid NLE design isn't a feature. FCPX is the first one to get it right, but the rusted on Premiere / Avid "professionals" refuse to see it.

You can simulate this by adding the `-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased` CSS rule to any website when using Safari or Chrome. Lots of websites already do this though, so you can use the value `subpixel-antialiased` to revert the text to that mode instead.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/font-smooth

To really appreciate the difference, I recommend turning on screen zoom with ctrl-scroll in the accessibility system prefs. You’ll see the effect of SPAA as colouring on the left and right edges of text.

Wow that's terrible. Would be really sad. Even on my non-retina MacBook's display it reduces drastically the readability.

The quality of sub-pixel AA depends A LOT on the physical parameters of the display. It's basically the OS saying "I know that pixels aren't actually square, and I'll use that knowledge to better digitize the font's curves." That worked fine when everything was CRTs or the same technology of LCD displays. However the faults of sup-pixel AA show through pretty strongly on the variety of modern displays (OLED vs AMOLED vs. ...), and the rotation capability of tablet displays. Apple is in the process of switching LED technologies across their products.

That said, if there's anyone in the position to exploit their knowledge of the ACTUAL physical display and its sub-pixel layout, it's Apple. I'd expect Windows or Android to drop sub-pixel AA... but iOS/macOS? I'm mystified.

I think Windows has a feature to configure the subpixel arrangement, what about MacOS? Sure they know about the internal screen, but not the one you plug in.

Don't screens tell the OS about their physical characteristics? At least the native resolution and the physical screen size (or dpi) are available to the OS somehow. I'd guess the sub-pixel arrangement might also be.

That's EDID you're talking about and AFAIK, it doesn't support that. On my android now but if anyone wants to fiddle around with what their screen provides, on Linux there is read-edid and parse-edid to query and interpret the raw data directly. It's not terribly much since it's 256 bytes max iirc.

i thought that subpixel aa smoothed by using the individual channels (r, g, b) of a pixel, not by taking into account the physical shape of a pixel.

Yes. But how do you know if it’s RGB or BGR or GBR etc? Sometimes there’s a fourth subpixel for white too.

On Windows there used to be a wizard where you had to choose which one looks better to let the system figure out your display’s subpixel arrangement.

The wizard is still there in the latest Win10

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I’ve never used Windows beyond 7.

Look at your screen with a magnifying glass. Then look at your phone's screen. And your TV screen.

I think we are saying the same thing. A pixel is actually three separate fixed color lights. By shape I meant their layout/arrangement and size.

Subpixel AA was never about CRTs; they do not have a consistent mapping between logical pixels and physical rgb holes in the shadow mask. It was always about LCDs

Having actually been in the graphics industry before LCDs were prevalent, we did sub-pixel rendering. It just wasn't built in as a standard feature in OS font rendering until LCDs made it necessary.

You can simulate this by going to System Preferences-->General-->Use LCD Font Smoothing When Available and unchecking it.

It also makes Retina-class devices look far worse. The fonts on my 5K iMac became much less readable after this change.

I do not think this is an accurate way to simulate the issue reported. This simulation will look worse than the actual issue, which is not present on 4K+ displays.

Yeah – on Mojave that checkbox still exists and unchecking it still makes fonts look different (less bold).

that's good to know! Then the difference shouldn't be that big on Retina displays.

I just compared on High Sierra and it's mostly that without subpixel AA types look thinner

I confirmed that the issue still exists by installing Mojave beta. The fonts looks terrible -- very thin and blurry.

This turns off smoothing across pixels, rather than subpixel antialiasing. Not the same thing.

>> It also makes Retina-class devices look far worse. The fonts on my 5K iMac became much less readable after this change.

I actually prefer this setting to be off on Retina screens. You don't need to anti-alias fonts on a 230ppi display.

You might not need it. I do.

OS X has never done gamma correction properly with subpixel antialiasing. Instead, it “dilates” the shapes slightly, but this is actually wrong. I suppose half the problem is getting used to the new, correct, line weights. This is more problematic on retina displays because the dilation affected the weight far more than the gamma deviations would’ve at high resolution.

What do you mean by dilation?

> that is nearly all monitors that people dock into at work or at home

And 1080p projectors in conference rooms.

That would be a dream. So many are still on 720p or lower, especially in schools etc.

> Or if you can install or somehow use the beta without nuking what you already have?

Yes, I'm running the beta right now. If you're scared about your data, create a new partition or virtual machine and install macOS to that.

I tried the beta when it came out and immediately downgraded because of the font, it looked worse even on the 5k iMac display.

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