Linux on the desktop isn't helped when people post truly delusional things like calling this 'modern.' Makes it look like people don't know what they don't know.
Not enough animation? Too easy to distinguish parts of the interface? Needs more ads? Do you have anything material to say?
What does that mean? Quality in what sense?
> high-precision
The UI is just rectangles and lines. Even "modern" UIs like Windows 10 is made up of just flat rectangles and lines. The precision to draw flat rectangles and lines hasn't changed over the decades.
> and high-fidelity rendering
The fidelity being high or low depends on the source material, GUIs are drawing themselves from scratch and at most copy existing resources (images, etc). Unless you use "high fidelity" as another way to write "good looking", which i hope you understand that is highly subjective.
None of that is subjective. In fact my point is that the rendering is subjective rather than objective (high-quality, high-precision, high-fidelity).
It's not just the text. Look at the dithering: low-precision rendering of colours. Look at the alpha-blending of the Firefox icon: low-fidelity of the icon file as it's been blended as an integer. Etc etc etc.
Given the mathematical input of the curves of the fonts, the colour gradients, the icon definitions, this is objectively a poor rendering as it doesn't match the declared intention.
Many people (me included) prefer non-antialiased text as it looks sharper. What you describe is an issue with the font used (unless it is a bitmap font, in which case the look you'd get would be the creator's intent). You can get that with fonts that do not have proper hinting, but that can be fixed (assuming you dislike the result) by using another font. Regardless this isn't an issue with the entirety of CDE or the rendering it uses, but with the specific font used.
> None of that is subjective.
The very specific issue you mentioned isn't subjective indeed, again assuming that the font in question was not a bitmap font designed to look as it looks. And of course it is only about the font, nothing else.
> In fact my point is that the rendering is subjective rather than objective (high-quality, high-prevision, high-fidelity).
TBH "high-quality, high-prevision, high-fidelity" sounds like some motto without substance. My comment was about trying to be more specific about what your issues were.
> Look at the dithering: low-precision rendering of colours.
The dithering is intentional, not due to an inability to display additional colors. While back in the 80s and 90s dithering was used to work around lack of color, nowadays it is almost always used as a stylistic choice. For example personally i often make my own icons for Window Maker (my WM of choice) and i pretty much always lower the colors to introduce some ordered dithering that creates that common cross-hatching pattern (often i do not even care about the amount of colors, just whatever looks adds a bit of that pattern without losing much color info) that i personally find aesthetically pleasing.
> Look at the alpha-blending of the Firefox icon: low-fidelity of the icon file as it's been blended as an integer
Yes that is also an objective issue. Not sure how hard it'd be to fix CDE use alpha blending, though the functionality is already provided by the X server as many window managers use it.
I spent time explaining what I meant by each of these, relating them to the mathematical definition of the input and how the output matched that.
If you wanted to, you could probably write a function to quantise how the output for different renderers diverged from the declared input. CDE would not do well compared to modern systems like macOS.
> Many people (me included) prefer non-antialiased text
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?
I think it's the latter. Which is why it isn't a modern system.
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.
I'm pretty sure the limited number of colours is exactly why CDE does this. At the time it was popular most X terms could only do a palette of 256 colours (from a larger number, I think 65535). Thus the dithering.
In fact if you opened up an image viewer like xv (xview) it would switch palettes and make your other windows look weird. Just because it needed all the colours to display a picture decently.
24-bit + alpha channel greatness only became mainstream after CDE was already a thing of the past.
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)
The implementation is not modern. You could have a modern implementation of the same aesthetic.
I don't. You seem to do. More as in better, not as in more triangles on screen or more graphic operations per second.
>The fidelity of the rendering is up to CDE, and the result is poor.
Hence my response: is this poor rendering "not enough graphics" for you (as in "not fancy enough")?
Because many could not care less for the "fidelity of the rendering" compared to the actual functionality.
I could be black and white dithered for all it matters (in fact, many would do with just some terminals).
I never mentioned more graphics. Only you did! Nobody here wants more graphics. You’re arguing with an imaginary person saying different things to me.
I’m interested in 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. This rendering is inaccurate and low-fidelity which makes it a poorer experience.
It’s not about being fancy it’s about showing me the text and I’m working with and the graphics that are there with as much precision as possible.
Compare the same fonts and icons rendered with a modern rasteriser style a modern DPI. Doesn’t compete.
> Because many could not care less for the "fidelity of the rendering" compared to the actual functionality.
Showing me the text and UI I’m working with is the functionality of a desktop environment. Without rendered text for me to work on… what am I doing in my desktop environment?
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.
Sadly many fonts nowadays do not have hinting information at all, but at least so far Firefox, etc allow me to override sites' font choices with fonts that look good with my setup.
On my 4K 24" turning anti-aliasing off makes it look less crisp though because the letters don't look just right.
We have super-crisp screens on our phones these days, why not on the computer?
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.
Overall I still think it's worth it. But YMMV of course!
If CDE could render better but let you opt out that'd be great... but it can't render more accurately in the first place. It's not choosing to be worse.
You'd be wrong.
What i write isn't about CDE but about antialiased text. As i wrote a few parent posts above i even have antialiased text disabled on Windows 10 via a registry setting and Windows can certainly do antialiased text rendering.
> If CDE could render better but let you opt out that'd be great... but it can't render more accurately in the first place. It's not choosing to be worse.
CDE can do antialiased text rendering, or more precisely Motif can (CDE doesn't render its own fonts) if configured to do so via Xft which uses FreeType for font rasterization - the same library that other toolkits (e.g. Qt) use. So its font rasterization can be as good as other toolkits. You need to do it via X resources and is opt-in instead of opt-out.
And besides i do not even use CDE myself, last time i used it was years ago out of curiosity. Personally on Linux i prefer Window Maker (which can also optionally use Xft for antialiased text rendering).
Can someone configure CDE to have accurate fonts and icons and 320 DPI if that’s what they prefer? If not why is that not possible?
Anyway, here are a couple of screenshots in the CDE wiki that says how to enable it[0]. Unsurprisingly the only comment there is about someone saying that they prefer the non-antialiased version.
Apparently there are a issues with the terminal emulator though i guess xterm would be a better choice anyway.
Though having said that even with touchscreens i'd rather use a stylus (i do that for my tablet actually) and styluses work fine with 90s style UIs.
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.
I have no idea why people still work on gnome/wayland right now. I would have left FOSS entirely if subject to that behaviour.
If you're calling it 'modern' when it everyone can see in two seconds that it isn't then you're just setting up both yourself and us for disappointment.
Don't blame the reaction - blame the preventable mistakes that caused the reaction.
Well, many people disagree that those are modern and good software - and while you could claim that those are "terrible preferences" the exact same can be claimed about your preferences. The point of Free Software is to allow for everyone to be in control of their own terrible choices :-P
As long as people become emotional about these things, they will react in emotional ways - which works both ways. I don't know if you realized it but here:
> In the end the Linux desktop is being severely held back and it takes over a decade to implement improvements like wayland which are critical for Linux to keep up with Windows and MacOS.
...you are basically accusing others for holding Linux back (ie. not letting it "keep up" with Windows and MacOS) because they do not see wayland (or gnome or whatever preferences you have) as an improvement. People, especially if they feel powerless to do much, can react to this as an attack. And i do not think you are making this easier by trying to pull out an emotional card like "FOSS devs are receiving real insults and threats constantly for simply developing something" - this thing can work wonders if you are among people who agree with you but also backfire badly if you are not.
But this is mainly a corporate game, not one played by independent developers. Remember, also X11 itself was a corporate invention. It came from DEC, MIT and IBM. I don't think it's fair to blame the users for its lack of progress.
But I still think choice is good. I don't want to be forced to use Gnome, I don't agree with their UI ideas (in particular the opinionated software paradigm). Having multiple desktop options is a great thing to have, and it lead to new ideas like tiling WMs such as i3. Personally I use KDE.
I don't think "Linux on the Desktop" should ever be a mainstream thing anyway. It would suffer from the drawbacks of the other options, such as too much corporate control. For something like Wayland it doesn't matter as it's just in the background doing its thing. But for a desktop environment it matters a lot. If Linux had only one option it would be just one of the other not-ideal options around. Just like ChromeOS has become, for that matter.
Also, it's not really realistic to expect all Linux users to 'get with the program' and use the biggest option available to strengthen Linux as a whole. Most of them use it because they want something different. Not because they want to promote Linux.
Systemd I don't like because it's so heavy. I really like lightweight systems. I use FreeBSD for that reason though I have other reasons too. And Alpine when I need Linux. Alpine is working on an init system based on s6 that will be more lightweight and I will give that a chance. I'm not against progress. I just like having options.
And Wayland, I don't mind it too much but I do miss the network transparency badly.
That's why options are a bad thing.
And look at other systems accomplishing this very well. Like KDE which has a ton of options and they don't suffer this problem.
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.
I don’t want to be stuck with a crappy desktop environment that I don’t like if I left windows for the same problems, and I doubt most people want to be forced into someone else’s narrow workflow as well.
Would you mind saying when was this? This is important as the KDE crew is delivering new features and bug fixes on a rapid cadence. So your experience from a year ago, might not be valid today.
Also, a lot of the issues KDE suffers from are out of the hands of the KDE devs, as some issues stem form GNOME devs enforcing their agenda on the Linux DE community as the defacto standard on how things should work, leaving the KDE devs to fix the jank they create.
Even then, you cannot make the omelet if you don't break the eggs.
That said, GNOME is one nice whole egg.
Are you a GNOME developer?
Aside: Gnome is far worse than KDE. systemd is an improvement on what was there previously, albeit not the only choice. I have enough experience with X to know how difficult it was to work with, a lot there needed to go.
However, Wayland is too minimal, we're going to have lots of unnecessary differences between Gnome-wayland, KDE-wayland, and wlroots-wayland thanks to wayland's bad focus. Speaking of this, want to look at stuff that held back Linux? Maybe have some words for people who prioritized irrelevant features over basic support for remote work.