Hacker News Reader

Comment by rms | Hacker News Reader

The MS OSes are terrible. Reinstalling the OS is actually a routine thing. More typical computer users just buy new systems when they become unusably slow after a couple years, which is good for Dell and the like.

What gets me to stay is tablet PC support and font rendering. Linux doesn't have an application that comes close to Microsoft OneNote for note taking. I wish that Apple made a touch screen Mac and I will probably switch when they launch one.

The font rendering on Windows blows away Linux and Mac, in my opinion. There is nothing so crisp as Windows standard font smoothing (not ClearType). Linux and Mac look incredibly ugly without subpixel font smoothing or other heavy anti-aliasing. I spent a while trying to figure out how to get Linux to render fonts better and gave up when it required a kernel recompile.

Has anyone here gotten Linux to render fonts well without subpixel anti-aliasing?

View on HN

I think there are all sorts of encumbering patents around doing that sort of stuff with fonts in certain ways. And the companies involved have been known to enforce those patents. Hence linux stays away (for the moment). Although it seems like with newer distros it is getting easier to turn this stuff on (but it is still up to you, and isn't a easy setting as yet).

Thats about all I know about it.

What about a good shell environment, stability, package management?

An OS is a lot of different things. It's too bad that the OS market is dominated by superficial concern with 'interoperability' (defined in the narrowest sense) and appearance. You can't get the best of everything, all in one nice package. Make sure the things you want the best of are really the things you can make the best use of!

I'm definitely not a fan of Mac fonts, but that might just be what I'm used to.

With Windows, you can turn font smoothing off completely and the fonts look like pixel fonts. With Linux and Mac, things look terrible without font smoothing.

See this post for an explanation of the fundamental difference between Mac and Windows font smoothing: Mac tries to render as closely to the printed typeface as possible and Windows tries to look good onscreen. http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000885.html

Odd... Personally I see Mac as gorgeous on screen fonts, and whenever I have to check things in IE on Windows XP the fonts look like some kid knocked them up in paint shop pro on a lazy sunday.

Maybe I'm missing something, but I've not seen nice fonts on windows yet.

You are right on the font, Windows blows away while Linux blows.

downmodded for being slightly profane? Linux font rendering really does blow.

Downmodded for lack of supporting arguments.

Looks fine out of the box on every install I've seen of the current most popular distribution (Ubuntu 7.04).

Also has worked fine on every distro I've used since at least 2000 (though back then I used Fedora, which at the time was a little ahead of the pack).

Vista, incidentally, requires a reboot to increase the font DPI. Try it.

Yes, it looks fine if you have font smoothing on, but try turning it off. The underlying font rendering is really poor, the underlying font rendering for Windows makes everything look like a pixel font.

Sure, monochrome fonts look bad.

Since font are rendered with smoothing by default, rather than the monochrome option, it's not really a supporting argument.

At less than obscene resolutions, I greatly prefer monochrome fonts over smoothed fonts, which look blurry to me. Whenever I'm running at 200DPI, I'll switch to subpixel anti-aliased fonts.

Windows gives me the option of having incredibly readable subtly smoothed monochrome fonts and Linux only lets me have smoothed fonts. This is one area (the only area, I admit) where Linux is less configurable, or at least has less worthwhile options than Windows. But text readability seems like the single most important issue to me in an OS, so I have to stick with Windows until I find a Linux kernel recompiled for better monochrome fonts.

Or I need to download a pixel font for all the standard web and system fonts, but copyright makes that illegal and impossible.

How the heck did you get your hands on a 200DPI display? The highest I've ever seen is 132DPI.

(It was an arbitrarily high number for rhetorical purposes. I probably should have made it smaller. I was trying to imply that I will switch to subpixel smoothed fonts at some later date.)

edit: here's one from 2003 that sold for $8,400. http://www.theinquirer.net/en/inquirer/news/2003/03/28/ibm-t...

You could just learn to compile a kernel. Not that tough, really -- and a valuable skill if you want to know about Xen and other things.

OK, I found some good instructions that require only a recompile of freetype -- apparently the reason Linux renders fonts so poorly is that Apple has the good algorithms patented, so they can't turn on the good font rendering by default.

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/showthread.php?s=694...

I might have to reinstall Linux this weekend, if it works I'll write a blog post with lots of pictures.

This guide has pictures of a Linux install with properly non-smoothed fonts. http://avi.alkalay.net/linux/docs/font-howto/Font.html

He doesn't need to compile a kernel for that, just Freetype.

Slightly off topic, most people who compile a kernel don't need to - they usually need to add a module, which if it isn't already packaged, is easily compilable on its own. Check RHEL 4's release notes (which show how to create a Makefile for a single module).

The compile love of Linux novices comes from old documentation from before kernel 2.0, when most drivers started being available as modules.

Good point, thanks for bringing that up.

Nailer, I was just expressing one point of opinion. I cannot support the fact that something looks bad.Its an opinion. Both me and my friend are looking at the same monitor (ubuntu fiesty) and he thinks "its just fine" and I think the fonts blow. It probably has to do with my extreme and acute sensitivity for colors and shapes. My screen resolution is 1920 by 1300.Anything less and I become irritable. Notice my news.yc id?

I love Linux, but the fonts blow(till fiesty standard installation). I have to check out Gutsy yet.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com