The Common Desktop Environment (CDE) in 2021

(also the deskapps i mentioned aren't using GNUstep, they're either pure X or some other toolkit)

Just imagine grep, cut, sed or awk ... as mime/content dependent tools which can be used only with XFCE. This whould be UNIX (dead end) if this thinking of "build everyting your own to work just for itself" attitude has been practiced back then, long ago. Sometimes it looks like past was the better future.

I'm talking about things as stalonetray, dunst, xsettingsd, xscreensaver, dex and such ... which can nicely fit in CDE, NsCDE, as well as in WindowMaker, i3, Enightenment, FluxBox, OpenBox etc ...

You only mentioned fonts and what you mentioned was only true about vector fonts without any hinting information (which is what allows fonts to be displayed as the designer intended on fixed grid output like a pixel grid). It is not true for vector fonts with hinting information nor about bitmap fonts.

And what your issue really was was about the binary-only representation, which basically means that what you wanted is subpixel accuracy - ie. introducing antialiasing. This is something that is actually subjective as many people (me included, as i already wrote) prefer the binary approach.

And indeed while you are right about the very specific case of how vector fonts are displayed without enough precision, even when a font renderer does allow for subpixel precision many people prefer to alter the output from what the designer would do for -in their opinion- better results: this is one of the oldest differences between people preferring Mac OS X's font rendering (no alterations) over Windows rendering (alterations to make fonts look sharper). Many font rendering setups you'll find on Linux provide control over this too and while you can objectively say which setup would be more "correct", what exactly looks better is down to the user.

Anyway, this was all about a specific case of font rendering and nothing else.

> If you wanted to, you could probably write a function to quantise how the output for different renderers diverged from the input. CDE would not do well compared to modern systems like macOS.

CDE is not a renderer, it uses Motif and Xlib (and perhaps xcb in places) for its graphics.

> Do you think CDE is making an intentional stylistic choice to render text in this way? Or do you think it doesn't have the functionality to render it with more fidelity to the font definition?

CDE uses Motif and Xlib, Motif does have the ability to render antialiased text via Xft which uses FreeType which is pretty much what most other toolkits use to perform font rasterization.

You can even see in the screenshot the Firefox icon using true color output (it sadly doesn't use alpha blending though, so this might actually be a CDE or Motif limitation - it shouldn't be impossible to fix it as the X server can do alpha blending nowadays but it needs someone to figure out where the limitation is and implement it)

I've already explained what I meant in my follow up comment, so I'm not sure why you continue to protest being misinterpreted. Not sure what you understood as the meaning of my "not enough graphics?" comment. But I tried to make it clear in the follow up (e.g. that your issue is the poor rendering, etc.), and it seems you have the same thing in mind as being the problem.

The distinction I am making is between graphics and functionality.

For me "rendering that is accurate, with fonts that are correctly hinted and rasterised and icons that are correctly composited, with a high-resolution for high-fidelity" is not functionality, it's graphics.

It's how CDE looks.

Whereas what's important (functionality) is what it does as a desktop environment/launcher.

If we were talking about GIMP or Photoshop or Premiere or even Word, sure "fonts that are correctly hinted and rasterised" would be part of the functionality. For a desktop environment, they are secondary.

You might agree or disagree, but that was the point I was making.

Some time ago I tried 150% scaling on my laptop (which has a 1080p monitor at a small size) and i just reverted to 100% because a lot of things, from websites to applications, etc didn't work properly. Note that this was on Windows but i do not expect things to be better in other OSes anyway (except perhaps macOS but it has a ton of other much worse drawbacks IMO).

Perhaps if all i used was terminal apps and pure text editors i'd have a different opinion but i use a lot of GUI apps with images, games, etc.

It looks cute in ads but truth is spending eight hours a day poking at your screen all the time just makes your hands sore, and after an hour or so, you spend half that time poking at the Undo button because you poked somewhere else than you meant by mistake.

It's just a wet dream of executives who never bothered to ask their underlings how they do their puny underling work. Wherever touch screens provided considerable advantages -- e.g. in touch-operated software for medical, imaging, CNC, SCADA industries -- they've already displaced non-touch devices since the 1990s. Everywhere else, suits have been singing dirges and whining about the post-PC era for ten years now and yet lo, walk into any open-space office, and you'll find nothing but rows and rows of 24" LCDs hooked to laptops with pristine screens.

Besides even then i'd use a stylus - in fact i have a tablet which is essentially a PC without a keyboard and i use it with one instead of rubbing my fingers against the device. Both cleaner and more precise.

At first the lack of options on gnome bothered me but then I just accepted the default config and found that it isn't actually important to be able to tweak every single bit of layout and the default config gnome ships is actually really good.

Even then, you cannot make the omelet if you don't break the eggs.

That said, GNOME is one nice whole egg.