Well, for starters, anti-aliased text?
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.