I keep occasionally trying new versions of GNOME but it feels like a DE optimized to look good in screenshots and always falls short when actually using it.
KDE on the other hand looks relatively good and is infinitely more usable to me. It's got some rougher edges and a weaker application ecosystem but still comes out ahead for me.
I also vastly prefer using apps written in QT to those written in GTK and despise CSD...
Maybe it’s subjective, maybe it’s a measurable thing. I’ve not looked, but I feel KDEs text rendering is worse on my daily driver.
* Removing an errant font-config lcdfilter configuration entry (this was a left over from when I was running "infinality" and should have been removed)
* Switching font from Noto Sans to Ubuntu
Its not perfect, but its a lot better. I'll probably play with oversampling (rendering X at a higher resolution and scaling down like OSX) at some point to see if I get the quality I want.
Gnome feels good on a computer with a single small display.
It all just gets out of the way.
I don't know why Gnome didn't adopt the Unity menu bar integration, instead you get to waste space on the taskbar on the bottom AND that useless status bar on the top.
Are you referring to the Window List extension? Why not use Dash to Dock instead, or even Dash to Panel (not sure if it’s current state, I don’t use it) which will also replace the main top status panel.
I’m a GNOME user on a single display (X because NVIDIA and 3D industry apps) and it works well for me. I do like the other DE’s though, I’m pretty agnostic in that sense.
Most of the time when I think about Unity these days I think about the sidebar launcher and the maximized window mode integration, not the rest of the features it provided; I didn’t get to spend a lot of time in Ubuntu.
1. You can set the launcher/taskbar/panel to auto-hide. 2. You can set up the screen corners (or a keyboard shortcut) to show an Exposé-style view of all running applications/windows. 3. You can have a global menu bar.
With KDE on a laptop I just set up the dock vertically on the righthand side and I'm good to go.
GNOME's workspace switcher/overview thing is better than anything KDE has though. It's much closer in function and polish to macOS than KDE is.
Go for a distro that follows upstream more closely.
I'm just a bit mystified, but... whatever makes it work for you.
Gnome developers have their head buried deep and firm in sands at this point.
> Using Harfbuzz for font loading means that we will lose support for bitmap and type1 fonts.
It's not as straight forward.
Pango prior to version 1.44 used kerning hints provided by FreeType but now makes use of the hints provided by HarfBuzz. But HarfBuzz doesn't support all of the hints supported by FreeType and thus a regression for some users depending upon their font hinting preferences and what visibly looks the best to them and their displays.
Remember Pango is a Gnome project.
The user pushback was unnecessary because this is a deeper technical issue than just these fonts. Additionally bitmap fonts are still usable as long as they are appropriately converted to OpenType.
Just from looking at the bug report there was a technical reason given related to other bugs and deficiencies in freetype. Please read the bug report in full detail, no developers are deleting features for no reason. Distros always have the option to choose whatever solution they want in response to user complaints. They can stay on an old version of whatever package they want or they can patch Harfbuzz and contribute the patches back upstream. You should take it up with your distro if the problem persists and they've not bothered to do either of these. Either way you have to be prepared to deal with the consequences which are: missing out on other newer features because you stayed on an old version, or spending the time/money to get the work done to add back in the features to the new version. Or you can upgrade anyway and do the workaround which is to convert your fonts.