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Comment by Shadonototra | Hacker News Reader

Font rendering quality massively dropped the past few years, not just with GTK, freetype is infected too (does GTK use freetype for fonts?)

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

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MacOS also has shitty rendering on sub-200 DPI since Mojave, as they did the same thing — kill off subpixel antialiasing:

https://twitter.com/tapbot_paul/status/1004361530018852864

One of the many reasons I switched to Windows. Linux is just too much pain for the eyes: Blurry fonts, screen tearing, ugh.

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.)

> One of the many reasons I switched to Windows. Linux is just too much pain for the eyes: Blurry fonts, screen tearing, ugh.

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 should also note that if your Windows has weird fonts, there’s a tool you can use to calibrate it somewhere in the legacy Control Panel settings. You basically choose the best looking text out of several options multiple times and it auto-tunes the font rendering based on those choices. A full run of it usually solves the problem.

well I did that and it still look shitty compared to my Fedora.

The problem with subpixel antialiasing (the rgba antialiasing), is that it is impossible to do properly with hardware acceleration when you need transparent surfaces or any rendering with an alpha channel in general. So you need software fallback for those cases, which slows down the rendering pipe eg in web browsers. for 4K screens is easier to just drop subpixel antialiasing and just rely on good old antialiasing instead, since it's no longer needed. I'm thinking most of the complaints with the newer rendering stacks are people still using FHD screen resolutions.

Whats very unclear is wether 4K make classic antialiasing as good or that subpixel antialiasing would render even better on 4K but they settle on "good enough"?

I think it's not necessarily better, but it's diminishing returns for additional complexity.

According to steam, the most popular screen resolution is FHD https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey

The top resolutions:

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)

[1]: https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share

> most of the complaints with the newer rendering stacks are people still using FHD screen resolutions.

I'd bet most people using Linux are using FHD screen resolutions. I'm one of them.

>It's pretty concerning, nobody seems to care

It's called the clown-college of Linux-distributions.

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