Fedora 36: Fonts in GTK 4 apps look different, more blurry
ask.fedoraproject.org
ask.fedoraproject.org
All ye who have faith in the GNOME maintainers to not put the cart before the horse, be warned and turn back now.
"Blurry text? I can't see it, it must not exist!"
"Fractional scaling? Just get a hidpi pixel-doubled monitor, why are you hurting yourself like that?"
"What's xOrg? We'll just drop support for you if you're not using an incredibly specific range of graphics hardware, that shouldn't be an issue right?"
"After taking a long, hard look at the Linux app scene, we've decided that AppIndicators are bloat and will be unsupported on GNOME (and Wayland, while we're at it)"
"Alternative color schemes and stylesheets are bloat, we're obfuscating the interface for it to make it harder for vision-impaired people to use our DE, as well as generally gimping the people who want to customize their desktop to their liking."
"Snaps are awful, so we're making our own version with more bugs and less features. Introducing Flatpak!"
It's all so tiresome. I've pledged to never write an app in GTK4 because of this asinine behavior, I'll stick with GTK3 until they get their circus act together.
The opening response in that bug report was "That could be described as more blurry, but its not a bug." but unreadable text seems a perfect example of a bug to me.
It's the sprawl of features that leads to those features being poorly implemented.
> It's the sprawl of features that leads to those features being poorly implemented.
Really? This issue didn't exist in GTK2 or GTK3. Sounds to me like you're making up excuses without any evidence.
Everyone can test it very quickly, open YouTube, switch to Dark Theme, open a video and read the comments
Compare with the same page on macOS or even windows, and you'll see the difference
It's pretty concerning, nobody seems to care
It's called the clown-college of Linux-distributions.
Though the worst is when using macOS on a low-DPI monitor (macOS nowadays is optimized for Retina displays and produces really blurry fonts on Full HD monitors.)
Strangely I got given a windows laptop by my employer a few months ago and I couldn't stand the font rendering quality compared to my Fedora 35 setup. I think font rendering is fine on GTK-3 / QT5. I only upgraded to Fedora 36 beta on an highdpi.
Judging from the issues on MacOS on smaller DPI I think the problem is universal and there is a fracture between the low and highDPI world. People using retina and 4/5K screens will probably be fine with GTK-4, issue is you can't force everyone to upgrade their gears, it is wrong from an environmental POV and a lot of laptops/monitors are still sold in FullHD or less resolution.
I'd bet most people using Linux are using FHD screen resolutions. I'm one of them.
1080p: 67%
1440p: 10%
768p: 7%
4k: 2.4%
900p: 2.3%
Other (includes 5k): 2.3%
There's a couple of other resolutions like ultrawide variants get about 1% each called out individually. Since 5k doesn't make the list, we can assume it's at most 1%.
So that's 3.3% for 4k and 5k combined.
I'll give you that this is a survey of gamers, so I'd expect 1440p to be overrepresented and 5k under-represented compared to say... video editors, but I also think gamers are the larger group of computer users between them. To get an idea of how distorted this is, Mac OS is 2.6% of steam users compared to 6% of global desktop users[1]
So if we apply a similar doubling to the retina display share, that's still 6-7% max. Not nearly enough to justify painting 1080p users as irrelevant holdouts.
(I would also wager that if you're expanding to "the general public", 768p will gain at a higher rate than retina displays)
Until they cut back on the bloated, padded default, no one is going to take gnome / gtk seriously as a productive desktop env. There is countless studies showing more scrolling or less information presented in all sorts (like finance, programming, creative writing etc), leads to more mistakes.
But yet, this is the default theme (gtk4) next to a custom one (Mojave-dark). Pointer (mouse precision) is increasing, why on earth would I need such a bloated UX.
https://gregloscombe-01.s3.eu-gb.cloud-object-storage.appdom...
And since then it has got worse and worse. Thank goodness for Mate!
I don't understand how it could get like this. KDE3.5 and GNOME2 suddenly look amazing compared to the modern UI. Bonkers. It's like they don't try using their computer for a day.
I used to use gnome-terminal, the last bit of gnome in my workflow. Then some genius decided to remove the --title argument to it, and you could no longer change the window title text. Somebody actually put in the work to remove that super basic feature.
No gnome for me, never again. It is a worthless project.
At this point, damn near to 20 years now, I'd say.
I've always found it bizarre that GNOME basically hid complexity away from users in a way that makes no sense. It often requires extensive workarounds or patching.