Missing the basics of high-quality, high-precision, and high-fidelity rendering. We've learned how to do these things since 1993.
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.