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Comment by sapiogram | Hacker News Reader

Idk about subpixel font rendering, but font rendering on Linux looks massively better after a patch last week: https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/7992#issuecomme...

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I'm glad there's finally some progress in that direction. If they actually implement subpixel RGB anti-aliasing, it would definitely be worth considering as an alternative. It's been surprising to see so many people praise Zed when its text rendering (of all things) has been in such a state for so long.

Tbh though, is subpixel text rendering really all that important anymore when high resolution monitors are common now and low-dpi is the exception?

You should get outside your major metropolis and highly paid Western job once in a while. High-DPI monitors are the exception for most of the world.

It doesn't take being outside of the west for this to be relevant. Two places I currently frequent, A) the software development offices of a fortune 500 company, and B) the entire office & general-spaces (classrooms, computer labs, etc) of a sizeable university, have 1080p monitors for >80% of their entire monitor deployment.

Even then... my visibility is pretty bad, so earlier this year I upgraded to 45" 3440x1440 monitors, and even then I'm viewing at 125%, so subpixel fonts helps a lot in terms of readability, even if I cannot pick out the native pixels well.

They aren't high-dpi though, just big and still zoomed. On the plus side, it's very similar experience to two 4:3 monitors glued together... side by side apps on half the screen is a pretty great experience... on the down side, RDP session suck, may need to see if I can find a scaling RDP app.

Most people I know are on 1920x1080 LCDs. Over half of PC gamers seem to be on that resolution, for example: https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey

My gaming PC is also connected to a 1080p display because tbh for gaming that's good enough, but I don't whine about application text quality on that setup since it looks pretty bad with or without ClearType compared to a highdpi display ;)

Yea, I tried to give it a go on Fedora, but the terrible text rendering made it a insta-delete, for me.

ok for what reason we need sub-pixel rgb anti aliasing here???? does we run game engine for code??

Subpixel antialiasing of fonts is a pretty standard feature for a few decades. Without it, text can look fuzzy on certain displays.

> does we run game engine for code??

Zed literally does this; they render their UI using a graphics library just like a video game.

It's fun to see "GPU accelerated" and "like game engine" when literally every application is rendered the same way with the same APIs.

Last I checked I don't create a GL context to make a WPF app.

That "after" image is still rendered with greyscale AA rather than subpixel, but whatever they changed did make it more legible at least.

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