This has been a problem with GTK4 for >11 months now. Nobody has bothered to fix it, they're all busy redesigning the default theme and cutting away features. Actually, the whole bug report thread for this issue is pretty sad to read: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/3787
All ye who have faith in the GNOME maintainers to not put the cart before the horse, be warned and turn back now.
Whenever I try to talk about this issue I feel like I'm being gaslit by the "Huh? I don't see anything blurry" folks... I can't tell if it's intentional, or they have figured out some ideal monitor resolution that hides the problem, or just bad eyesight.
This happens everywhere in the GNOME ecosystem, it's why they'll never be the MacOS replacement they so desperately want to imitate.
"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.
This is such a good summary. I went from Linux to macos a decade ago and then have come back to Mate on Linux because my macbook is too old to be supported, and also because macos was really leading the way in needlessly locking stuff down and insane UI decisions (let's use all the menubar for icons with loads of whitespace between them). Seems GNOME is following this trend.
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.
I don't. I dropped GTK4 a long time ago because it's simply not finished or ready for the mainstream, I'm happy to let it fester in the realm of unusability because the most well-supported desktop environment on Linux can't get their priorities straight.
> 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.
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.
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"?
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)
I just don't get GTK / Gnome decisions anymore. Font rendering is one part, but my personal hate is the stupid over padded default theme. Coupled with the fact they are making it as painful as they can get away with whilst still saying they support custom themes.
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.
It seemed to start around the GNOME 3 time when they were "simplifying" apps by removing all useful UI elements and hiding them in a hamburger menu that you couldn't access with the keyboard, ensuring you spent 80% of your time waving the mouse cursor around waiting for submenus to appear.
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.
Anymore? Gnome/GTK has been like this for a long, long time. The relentless taking away of options, choices, the ridiculous "everything mobile UI" drive, that's been going on for YEARS.
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.
> The relentless taking away of options, choices, the ridiculous "everything mobile UI" drive, that's been going on for YEARS.
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.
As someone who uses stock GNOME on Fedora with only minor theme tweaks on most of my devices - speak for yourself! On my touchscreen laptop the large buttons are welcome, and when scaled down on a 4K display it doesn’t matter that much. On my desktop I do use arc-theme however, so I see where you’re coming from.
I think GTK3 was the sweet spot. I used GNOME 3 for a while on the desktop and it was really nice once you tossed some extensions in (and replaced the ugly Adwaita colorscheme). Then I updated to GNOME 40 and felt physical repulsion, so I moved to Plasma, probably for good. I'd love to explore the timeline where the maintainers didn't axe a ton of features/support and instead focused on doing their own thing really well. Now all we have is a lame Mac clone, and they can't even deny it anymore.
All ye who have faith in the GNOME maintainers to not put the cart before the horse, be warned and turn back now.