5 ms·

Dunno, I expect antialiased font rendering in modern software. Talk about overselling.

edgyquant 5y ago
I’m not sure how anybody considers things like CDE or the the old Windows 9x aesthetically pleasing. Say what you want about MacOS/Gnome/Windows at least they are easy on the eyes
- marcodiego 5y ago
  Windows 9x aesthetic is good, except for non antialiased fonts. The same can be said about CDE. Take a look a modern lookalike with AA fonts: https://github.com/NsCDE/NsCDE https://github.com/NsCDE/NsCDE . Fonts in nscde still look blurry to me, maybe it is missing kerning or hinting... but looks much better to my eyes.
  - edgyquant 5y ago
    Eh. The beige and green just look ugly to me and the boxiness of the UI isn’t pleasing to the eyes. That’s my opinion, sure, but I’d say there’s a reason why Microsoft and Apple have went with the designs they currently have.
    - marcodiego 5y ago
      CDE has some pleasing color options to choose from. The blockiness of the UI is really brutalist but maybe it is a matter of what one is used to. When watching Hollywood movies in the 90's it looked modern, almost sci-fi. Maybe the windows aesthetic was influenced by hardware limitations of the time: smaller screens, lower resolutions and somewhat blurry CRTs. Windows on a modern larger, higher DPI e very sharp LCD will look small and hard to differentiate smaller details; CDE on a large high DPI screen makes it very easy to differ smaller details and the borders "better communicate" limits. I like KDE 1.0 appearance. It's got a good balance of influences from CDE, OS/2 and Windows.
    - Hegel3DReloaded 5y ago
      Why are you judging the whole DE on the basis of default color scheme (replaceable 5 clicks away with 15-20 ready made color schemes after log in)? One can even compose it's own scheme by clicking "modify", name it and save it.
  - Hegel3DReloaded 5y ago
    Hi. Author of NsCDE here. Fonts in NsCDE are system XFT fonts. Whatever you install on your Unix/Linux system, and however you configure your XFT library (usually in /etc/fonts/fonts.conf) you will have it. Personally, I prefer the middle ground: sligtly antialiased, but high quality sans family fonts like Bitstream Vera and Bitstream Vera Mono, not default classic serif font which is default for historical reasons, just like "Broica" color scheme.
    - marcodiego 5y ago
      Cool! Nice getting a reply from nscde author! Do you have plans to do anything like application builder?
      - Hegel3DReloaded 5y ago
        Heh! No chance. This will be too huge task to create creator ... FVWM has already FvwmScript module in which most of the NsCDE tools are written.
- linguae 5y ago
  This is just my opinion, but I actually love the Windows 9x aesthetic and to this day I wish Windows 10/11 had support for the Windows Classic interface; back in the days of Windows XP and 7 I always changed the theme from the default to Windows Classic. While I'm at it, I actually prefer the aesthetic of the classic Mac OS (especially the Platinum theme introduced in Copland and Mac OS 8) to modern versions of macOS, though I am quite fond of the clean, polished Tiger-era Mac OS X aesthetic. I'm also a fan of the NeXT aesthetic and I sometimes use WindowMaker as a lightweight desktop on Linux and FreeBSD installations, though these days I use KDE whenever I need a full-featured desktop for my daily driver (but I'm keeping an eye on helloSystem, a FreeBSD-based operating system that is inspired by Tiger-era Mac OS X: https://hellosystem.github.io/docs/ https://hellosystem.github.io/docs/).
  - kevin_thibedeau 5y ago
    A few resource settings in .Xdefaults to strip away the 3D look and you can have a Windows 10 aesthetic. Is that not good enough?
- Hegel3DReloaded 5y ago
  From early 90-ties until today, when I saw CDE first time, I was impressed with it's outfit resembling something akin to brutalism in architecture. Whatever I used during the ears, privately or at work, I always tried to reconstruct as much as possible that look and partially feel. I love it! So, today I'm typing this in a heavy CSS'ed Firefox which looks how Netscape 4 should look way back ago if somebody bothered to integrate it into CDE. Bottom of the screen is guarded by Front Panel with nice 3D buttons saying "One", "Two", "Three" and "Four". MacOS/Gnome/Windows easy on eyes? Yeah, like a knife.
- CRConrad 5y ago
  > Say what you want about MacOS/Gnome/Windows at least they are easy on the eyes Windows 8/10? De gustibus... IMO they're hideous.
amyjess 5y ago
The problem isn't the lack of AA, it's the lack of hinting. Unhinted fonts just look like an unaligned jumble when used in UX.
- garaetjjte 5y ago
  Posted screenshots doesn't have AA. (opinion on hinting vary, eg. MacOS doesn't do hinting and it doesn't look too bad)
badsectoracula 5y ago
Motif can certainly do antialiased font rendering and could do for many years now, but this is most likely configured to use these fonts as you need to explicitly set up Xft font rendering via X resources to use antialiasing.
- md8z 5y ago
  "you need to explicitly set up Xft font rendering via X resources" I hope you can understand that any time you say something like this, or tell people to edit xorg.conf or some other cryptic config file, or tell people to put random commands in their bash profile, or something like that, it kind of makes the software appear to be not really modern or usable. Sorry. (This is not specific to CDE, pretty much all Linux desktops suffer from this bad usability at some point)
  - badsectoracula 5y ago
    The claim was that CDE is modern, not that is easy to use. TBH i wouldn't really call it modern either, but that is largely because "modern" is a vague nondescriptive term that practically means nothing (and it certainly doesn't mean anything related to ease of use :-P). Helpful for PR and marketing, not so much for technical stuff. And IMO pretty much everyone who posted here focused on superficial things like how fonts render instead of practical things like what sort of desktop standards does it support - e.g. can it parse .desktop files to fill application lists? Can it support tray icons so that, e.g., if i run Steam i get an icon somewhere for it? How about some more recent standards like displaying application progress bars (where that makes sense)? IMO think these are more important and a much better indicator about the state of a desktop environment than how fonts render (which isn't even something CDE itself does anyway).
    - md8z 5y ago
      Actually last time I tried CDE, maybe a few years ago, there were multiple areas where it was not possible to configure something with a GUI. Not just fonts. In fact there were buttons in various settings panels that when you clicked them, would launch a text editor in an xterm window to edit a config file with no explanation of what you're supposed to be doing. I thought that was totally ridiculous. Sorry I can't mention something more specific but it was a while ago and I could be remembering it incorrectly. For a modern desktop I would also expect wayland support, and integration with networkmanager, pulseaudio/pipewire, udisks, things like that, which also didn't seem to be implemented last time I checked, but if any of this has changed then please let me know. Systrays and desktop files are like 15-20 years old so that's not really a compelling case for modern features...
LeoPanthera 5y ago
In a world of 300+ dpi displays, does antialiasing really matter anymore?
- watt 5y ago
  Make the fonts look _good_ on those screenshots, and we don't need to talk about it. As it stands, the font rendering on those screenshots makes me want to vomit.

I’m not sure how anybody considers things like CDE or the the old Windows 9x aesthetically pleasing. Say what you want about MacOS/Gnome/Windows at least they are easy on the eyes

marcodiego 5y ago
Windows 9x aesthetic is good, except for non antialiased fonts. The same can be said about CDE. Take a look a modern lookalike with AA fonts: https://github.com/NsCDE/NsCDE https://github.com/NsCDE/NsCDE . Fonts in nscde still look blurry to me, maybe it is missing kerning or hinting... but looks much better to my eyes.
- edgyquant 5y ago
  Eh. The beige and green just look ugly to me and the boxiness of the UI isn’t pleasing to the eyes. That’s my opinion, sure, but I’d say there’s a reason why Microsoft and Apple have went with the designs they currently have.
  - marcodiego 5y ago
    CDE has some pleasing color options to choose from. The blockiness of the UI is really brutalist but maybe it is a matter of what one is used to. When watching Hollywood movies in the 90's it looked modern, almost sci-fi. Maybe the windows aesthetic was influenced by hardware limitations of the time: smaller screens, lower resolutions and somewhat blurry CRTs. Windows on a modern larger, higher DPI e very sharp LCD will look small and hard to differentiate smaller details; CDE on a large high DPI screen makes it very easy to differ smaller details and the borders "better communicate" limits. I like KDE 1.0 appearance. It's got a good balance of influences from CDE, OS/2 and Windows.
  - Hegel3DReloaded 5y ago
    Why are you judging the whole DE on the basis of default color scheme (replaceable 5 clicks away with 15-20 ready made color schemes after log in)? One can even compose it's own scheme by clicking "modify", name it and save it.
- Hegel3DReloaded 5y ago
  Hi. Author of NsCDE here. Fonts in NsCDE are system XFT fonts. Whatever you install on your Unix/Linux system, and however you configure your XFT library (usually in /etc/fonts/fonts.conf) you will have it. Personally, I prefer the middle ground: sligtly antialiased, but high quality sans family fonts like Bitstream Vera and Bitstream Vera Mono, not default classic serif font which is default for historical reasons, just like "Broica" color scheme.
  - marcodiego 5y ago
    Cool! Nice getting a reply from nscde author! Do you have plans to do anything like application builder?
    - Hegel3DReloaded 5y ago
      Heh! No chance. This will be too huge task to create creator ... FVWM has already FvwmScript module in which most of the NsCDE tools are written.
linguae 5y ago
This is just my opinion, but I actually love the Windows 9x aesthetic and to this day I wish Windows 10/11 had support for the Windows Classic interface; back in the days of Windows XP and 7 I always changed the theme from the default to Windows Classic. While I'm at it, I actually prefer the aesthetic of the classic Mac OS (especially the Platinum theme introduced in Copland and Mac OS 8) to modern versions of macOS, though I am quite fond of the clean, polished Tiger-era Mac OS X aesthetic. I'm also a fan of the NeXT aesthetic and I sometimes use WindowMaker as a lightweight desktop on Linux and FreeBSD installations, though these days I use KDE whenever I need a full-featured desktop for my daily driver (but I'm keeping an eye on helloSystem, a FreeBSD-based operating system that is inspired by Tiger-era Mac OS X: https://hellosystem.github.io/docs/ https://hellosystem.github.io/docs/).
- kevin_thibedeau 5y ago
  A few resource settings in .Xdefaults to strip away the 3D look and you can have a Windows 10 aesthetic. Is that not good enough?
Hegel3DReloaded 5y ago
From early 90-ties until today, when I saw CDE first time, I was impressed with it's outfit resembling something akin to brutalism in architecture. Whatever I used during the ears, privately or at work, I always tried to reconstruct as much as possible that look and partially feel. I love it! So, today I'm typing this in a heavy CSS'ed Firefox which looks how Netscape 4 should look way back ago if somebody bothered to integrate it into CDE. Bottom of the screen is guarded by Front Panel with nice 3D buttons saying "One", "Two", "Three" and "Four". MacOS/Gnome/Windows easy on eyes? Yeah, like a knife.
CRConrad 5y ago
> Say what you want about MacOS/Gnome/Windows at least they are easy on the eyes Windows 8/10? De gustibus... IMO they're hideous.

amyjess 5y ago

The problem isn't the lack of AA, it's the lack of hinting. Unhinted fonts just look like an unaligned jumble when used in UX.

garaetjjte 5y ago
Posted screenshots doesn't have AA. (opinion on hinting vary, eg. MacOS doesn't do hinting and it doesn't look too bad)

badsectoracula 5y ago

Motif can certainly do antialiased font rendering and could do for many years now, but this is most likely configured to use these fonts as you need to explicitly set up Xft font rendering via X resources to use antialiasing.

md8z 5y ago
"you need to explicitly set up Xft font rendering via X resources" I hope you can understand that any time you say something like this, or tell people to edit xorg.conf or some other cryptic config file, or tell people to put random commands in their bash profile, or something like that, it kind of makes the software appear to be not really modern or usable. Sorry. (This is not specific to CDE, pretty much all Linux desktops suffer from this bad usability at some point)
- badsectoracula 5y ago
  The claim was that CDE is modern, not that is easy to use. TBH i wouldn't really call it modern either, but that is largely because "modern" is a vague nondescriptive term that practically means nothing (and it certainly doesn't mean anything related to ease of use :-P). Helpful for PR and marketing, not so much for technical stuff. And IMO pretty much everyone who posted here focused on superficial things like how fonts render instead of practical things like what sort of desktop standards does it support - e.g. can it parse .desktop files to fill application lists? Can it support tray icons so that, e.g., if i run Steam i get an icon somewhere for it? How about some more recent standards like displaying application progress bars (where that makes sense)? IMO think these are more important and a much better indicator about the state of a desktop environment than how fonts render (which isn't even something CDE itself does anyway).
  - md8z 5y ago
    Actually last time I tried CDE, maybe a few years ago, there were multiple areas where it was not possible to configure something with a GUI. Not just fonts. In fact there were buttons in various settings panels that when you clicked them, would launch a text editor in an xterm window to edit a config file with no explanation of what you're supposed to be doing. I thought that was totally ridiculous. Sorry I can't mention something more specific but it was a while ago and I could be remembering it incorrectly. For a modern desktop I would also expect wayland support, and integration with networkmanager, pulseaudio/pipewire, udisks, things like that, which also didn't seem to be implemented last time I checked, but if any of this has changed then please let me know. Systrays and desktop files are like 15-20 years old so that's not really a compelling case for modern features...

LeoPanthera 5y ago

In a world of 300+ dpi displays, does antialiasing really matter anymore?

watt 5y ago
Make the fonts look _good_ on those screenshots, and we don't need to talk about it. As it stands, the font rendering on those screenshots makes me want to vomit.