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Comment by necovek | Hacker News Reader

The pet peeve of mine is lack of subpixel rendering: if you move from X to Wayland, it's hard to get used to fuzzy fonts.

Then again, recent MacOS versions have also dropped it, and I couldn't stand fuzzy fonts either (and so much for their screens being "retina" screens).

At least this is coming to Wayland :)

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Wait, what? Longtime Wayland hater here and I literally thought this was one of the things I could expect Wayland to be better at.

In order to do subpixel font rendering correctly, the application needs to know about the subpixel arrangement of the display hardware. So it falls under the same category as things like color management, which Wayland also doesn't support; they just didn't standardize an API to provide that information.

Wayland has definitely provided subpixel layouts to applications for years:

https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland/-/blob/main/p...

Whether or not applications are making use of it might be a different story.

Ah, thanks! I was more familiar with the color management situation than the subpixel anti-aliasing situation.

Wayland does send subpixel info to clients for thus purpose. See wl_output.

Thanks: I haven't dove deep enough to know exactly where the issue was, but booting into Gnome wayland session on Ubuntu 22.04 resulted in blurry fonts on my external 32" 4k screen, whereas just switching the session to Gnome on X worked fine.

My search at the time (a few months ago) suggested that subpixel rendering didn't work (changing settings from gnome-tweaks didn't do anything either).

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