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Linux on the desktop isn't helped when people post truly delusional things like calling this 'modern.' Makes it look like people don't know what they don't know

Linux on the desktop isn't helped when people post truly delusional things like calling this 'modern.' Makes it look like people don't know what they don't know.

yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
> Linux on the desktop isn't helped when people post truly delusional things like calling this 'modern.' Not enough animation? Too easy to distinguish parts of the interface? Needs more ads? Do you have anything material to say?
- chrisseaton 5y ago
  Missing the basics of high-quality, high-precision, and high-fidelity rendering. We've learned how to do these things since 1993.
  - badsectoracula 5y ago
    > high-quality What does that mean? Quality in what sense? > high-precision The UI is just rectangles and lines. Even "modern" UIs like Windows 10 is made up of just flat rectangles and lines. The precision to draw flat rectangles and lines hasn't changed over the decades. > and high-fidelity rendering The fidelity being high or low depends on the source material, GUIs are drawing themselves from scratch and at most copy existing resources (images, etc). Unless you use "high fidelity" as another way to write "good looking", which i hope you understand that is highly subjective.
    - chrisseaton 5y ago
      Look at the text. Can you see how blocky it is? And how awkward the gaps are between letters? That doesn't represent the definition of the fonts that are being used. It's a low-quality rendering in that it's literally a binary quantisation of the curves in the font. It's low-precision in that the output only considers pixel boundaries. It's low-fidelity in that it doesn't represent the creator's intent for the font. None of that is subjective. In fact my point is that the rendering is subjective rather than objective (high-quality, high-precision, high-fidelity). It's not just the text. Look at the dithering: low-precision rendering of colours. Look at the alpha-blending of the Firefox icon: low-fidelity of the icon file as it's been blended as an integer. Etc etc etc. Given the mathematical input of the curves of the fonts, the colour gradients, the icon definitions, this is objectively a poor rendering as it doesn't match the declared intention.
      - badsectoracula 5y ago
        > Look at the text. Many people (me included) prefer non-antialiased text as it looks sharper. What you describe is an issue with the font used (unless it is a bitmap font, in which case the look you'd get would be the creator's intent). You can get that with fonts that do not have proper hinting, but that can be fixed (assuming you dislike the result) by using another font. Regardless this isn't an issue with the entirety of CDE or the rendering it uses, but with the specific font used. > None of that is subjective. The very specific issue you mentioned isn't subjective indeed, again assuming that the font in question was not a bitmap font designed to look as it looks. And of course it is only about the font, nothing else. > In fact my point is that the rendering is subjective rather than objective (high-quality, high-prevision, high-fidelity). TBH "high-quality, high-prevision, high-fidelity" sounds like some motto without substance. My comment was about trying to be more specific about what your issues were. > Look at the dithering: low-precision rendering of colours. The dithering is intentional, not due to an inability to display additional colors. While back in the 80s and 90s dithering was used to work around lack of color, nowadays it is almost always used as a stylistic choice. For example personally i often make my own icons for Window Maker (my WM of choice) and i pretty much always lower the colors to introduce some ordered dithering that creates that common cross-hatching pattern (often i do not even care about the amount of colors, just whatever looks adds a bit of that pattern without losing much color info) that i personally find aesthetically pleasing. > Look at the alpha-blending of the Firefox icon: low-fidelity of the icon file as it's been blended as an integer Yes that is also an objective issue. Not sure how hard it'd be to fix CDE use alpha blending, though the functionality is already provided by the X server as many window managers use it.
        chrisseaton 5y ago
        > TBH "high-quality, high-prevision, high-fidelity" sounds like some motto without substance. I spent time explaining what I meant by each of these, relating them to the mathematical definition of the input and how the output matched that. If you wanted to, you could probably write a function to quantise how the output for different renderers diverged from the declared input. CDE would not do well compared to modern systems like macOS. > Many people (me included) prefer non-antialiased text Do you think CDE is making an intentional stylistic choice to render text in this way? Or do you think it doesn't have the functionality to render it with more fidelity to the font definition? I think it's the latter. Which is why it isn't a modern system.
  - coldtea 5y ago
    Not enough graphics?
    - chrisseaton 5y ago
      I don't get this response to my comment. Why do you want more graphics? How many graphics there are is a decision of the application. The fidelity of the rendering is up to CDE, and the result is poor.
      - coldtea 5y ago
        >Why do you want more graphics? I don't. You seem to do. More as in better, not as in more triangles on screen or more graphic operations per second. >The fidelity of the rendering is up to CDE, and the result is poor. Hence my response: is this poor rendering "not enough graphics" for you (as in "not fancy enough")? Because many could not care less for the "fidelity of the rendering" compared to the actual functionality. I could be black and white dithered for all it matters (in fact, many would do with just some terminals).
        chrisseaton 5y ago
        > is this poor rendering "not enough graphics" for you (as in "not fancy enough")? I never mentioned more graphics. Only you did! Nobody here wants more graphics. You’re arguing with an imaginary person saying different things to me. I’m interested in rendering that is accurate, with fonts that are correctly hinted and rasterised and icons that are correctly composited, with a high-resolution for high-fidelity. This rendering is inaccurate and low-fidelity which makes it a poorer experience. It’s not about being fancy it’s about showing me the text and I’m working with and the graphics that are there with as much precision as possible. Compare the same fonts and icons rendered with a modern rasteriser style a modern DPI. Doesn’t compete. > Because many could not care less for the "fidelity of the rendering" compared to the actual functionality. Showing me the text and UI I’m working with is the functionality of a desktop environment. Without rendered text for me to work on… what am I doing in my desktop environment?
  - blablabla123 5y ago
    It should be a doable effort to implement high-res font rendering - maybe even just the font needs to be swapped out. I think it's great when good software gets maintained and renewed which is the case here as far as I understand even if there are still some things that could be improved. That said, I like the look&feel of CDE, good to see efforts to get this working on Linux.
- jmgao 5y ago
  Well, for starters, anti-aliased text?
  - badsectoracula 5y ago
    Not everyone likes that, personally i always disable antialiasing. Even on Windows 10 i use a registry setting (since Microsoft thought it wise to hide the UI option) to disable text antialiasing since i prefer the sharp text. Sadly many fonts nowadays do not have hinting information at all, but at least so far Firefox, etc allow me to override sites' font choices with fonts that look good with my setup.
    - GekkePrutser 5y ago
      Anti-aliasing looks great on a screen with high enough DPI so you can barely see the pixels. On a low-DPI screen it does look fuzzy. On my 4K 24" turning anti-aliasing off makes it look less crisp though because the letters don't look just right.
      - badsectoracula 5y ago
        Yeah, maybe. I do not have a very high DPI monitor and TBH i find even my 27" 1440p monitor to be too high DPI for my taste, i just couldn't find something smaller with the other specs i wanted (VA for having decent blacks and with a high refresh rate). I'll probably replace it with a ~23" 1080p monitor at some point though if i find a VA with high refresh rate... and not be curved (because for some reason 99% of them are curved). Either way i'll stick with the non-antialiased fonts :-P.
        GekkePrutser 5y ago
        Well I would find 27" 1440p too high DPI too if I ran it at 100% scaling :) I run my 24" 4K at 200% scaling so it's effectively 1080p. Just super crisp which I like. We have super-crisp screens on our phones these days, why not on the computer?
- potatoman22 5y ago
  Their UI looks like it's from the 90s. The technology may be modern, but the things users actually interact with and see is certainly not.
  - badsectoracula 5y ago
    UI was best in the 90s anyway, so that is a plus.
    - md8z 5y ago
      I implore you to try to use a 90s-style UI on a touchscreen, and then let's see if you want to revisit that statement...
      - badsectoracula 5y ago
        I do not use touchscreens for desktop environments (the post is for a desktop environment) and the overwhelmingly vast majority of touch screens are for mobile devices which need and have their own conventions and UX - trying to shoehorn one on another is a disaster (not that some do not try but this is also a major source of modern UI awfulness). Though having said that even with touchscreens i'd rather use a stylus (i do that for my tablet actually) and styluses work fine with 90s style UIs.
        pjmlp 5y ago
        Laptops are the new desktops, and many of them (unless Macs) ship with touch screens.
        alxlaz 5y ago
        Ever seen those used in an office setting? I have, and it was hilarious. Everyone swore at their laptops for two or three days, and then they all scrambled for mice. No screens were touched afterwards. It looks cute in ads but truth is spending eight hours a day poking at your screen all the time just makes your hands sore, and after an hour or so, you spend half that time poking at the Undo button because you poked somewhere else than you meant by mistake. It's just a wet dream of executives who never bothered to ask their underlings how they do their puny underling work. Wherever touch screens provided considerable advantages -- e.g. in touch-operated software for medical, imaging, CNC, SCADA industries -- they've already displaced non-touch devices since the 1990s. Everywhere else, suits have been singing dirges and whining about the post-PC era for ten years now and yet lo, walk into any open-space office, and you'll find nothing but rows and rows of 24" LCDs hooked to laptops with pristine screens.
Gigachad 5y ago
It must be truely depressing being a Linux FOSS developer when any time you try to make something quality and up to todays standards, the Linux user base whinge and insult you for years. I have no idea why people still work on gnome/wayland right now. I would have left FOSS entirely if subject to that behaviour.
- chrisseaton 5y ago
  If you've got a bare-bones, basics, simple desktop-environment then embrace that and tell us! If you're calling it 'modern' when it everyone can see in two seconds that it isn't then you're just setting up both yourself and us for disappointment. Don't blame the reaction - blame the preventable mistakes that caused the reaction.
  - Gigachad 5y ago
    I’m not calling CDE modern. I’m saying that the Linux user base has terrible preferences when it comes to software which hold back actually modern and good software like Gnome/Wayland/systemd.
    - badsectoracula 5y ago
      > actually modern and good software like Gnome/Wayland/systemd. Well, many people disagree that those are modern and good software - and while you could claim that those are "terrible preferences" the exact same can be claimed about your preferences. The point of Free Software is to allow for everyone to be in control of their own terrible choices :-P
      - Gigachad 5y ago
        Everyone is entitled to use what they want, but this goes way beyond choosing something different. FOSS devs are receiving real insults and threats constantly for simply developing something. In the end the Linux desktop is being severely held back and it takes over a decade to implement improvements like wayland which are critical for Linux to keep up with Windows and MacOS.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

Linux on the desktop isn't helped when people post truly delusional things like calling this 'modern.' Makes it look like people don't know what they don't know.

yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago

> Linux on the desktop isn't helped when people post truly delusional things like calling this 'modern.' Not enough animation? Too easy to distinguish parts of the interface? Needs more ads? Do you have anything material to say?

chrisseaton 5y ago
Missing the basics of high-quality, high-precision, and high-fidelity rendering. We've learned how to do these things since 1993.
- badsectoracula 5y ago
  > high-quality What does that mean? Quality in what sense? > high-precision The UI is just rectangles and lines. Even "modern" UIs like Windows 10 is made up of just flat rectangles and lines. The precision to draw flat rectangles and lines hasn't changed over the decades. > and high-fidelity rendering The fidelity being high or low depends on the source material, GUIs are drawing themselves from scratch and at most copy existing resources (images, etc). Unless you use "high fidelity" as another way to write "good looking", which i hope you understand that is highly subjective.
  - chrisseaton 5y ago
    Look at the text. Can you see how blocky it is? And how awkward the gaps are between letters? That doesn't represent the definition of the fonts that are being used. It's a low-quality rendering in that it's literally a binary quantisation of the curves in the font. It's low-precision in that the output only considers pixel boundaries. It's low-fidelity in that it doesn't represent the creator's intent for the font. None of that is subjective. In fact my point is that the rendering is subjective rather than objective (high-quality, high-precision, high-fidelity). It's not just the text. Look at the dithering: low-precision rendering of colours. Look at the alpha-blending of the Firefox icon: low-fidelity of the icon file as it's been blended as an integer. Etc etc etc. Given the mathematical input of the curves of the fonts, the colour gradients, the icon definitions, this is objectively a poor rendering as it doesn't match the declared intention.
    - badsectoracula 5y ago
      > Look at the text. Many people (me included) prefer non-antialiased text as it looks sharper. What you describe is an issue with the font used (unless it is a bitmap font, in which case the look you'd get would be the creator's intent). You can get that with fonts that do not have proper hinting, but that can be fixed (assuming you dislike the result) by using another font. Regardless this isn't an issue with the entirety of CDE or the rendering it uses, but with the specific font used. > None of that is subjective. The very specific issue you mentioned isn't subjective indeed, again assuming that the font in question was not a bitmap font designed to look as it looks. And of course it is only about the font, nothing else. > In fact my point is that the rendering is subjective rather than objective (high-quality, high-prevision, high-fidelity). TBH "high-quality, high-prevision, high-fidelity" sounds like some motto without substance. My comment was about trying to be more specific about what your issues were. > Look at the dithering: low-precision rendering of colours. The dithering is intentional, not due to an inability to display additional colors. While back in the 80s and 90s dithering was used to work around lack of color, nowadays it is almost always used as a stylistic choice. For example personally i often make my own icons for Window Maker (my WM of choice) and i pretty much always lower the colors to introduce some ordered dithering that creates that common cross-hatching pattern (often i do not even care about the amount of colors, just whatever looks adds a bit of that pattern without losing much color info) that i personally find aesthetically pleasing. > Look at the alpha-blending of the Firefox icon: low-fidelity of the icon file as it's been blended as an integer Yes that is also an objective issue. Not sure how hard it'd be to fix CDE use alpha blending, though the functionality is already provided by the X server as many window managers use it.
      - chrisseaton 5y ago
        > TBH "high-quality, high-prevision, high-fidelity" sounds like some motto without substance. I spent time explaining what I meant by each of these, relating them to the mathematical definition of the input and how the output matched that. If you wanted to, you could probably write a function to quantise how the output for different renderers diverged from the declared input. CDE would not do well compared to modern systems like macOS. > Many people (me included) prefer non-antialiased text Do you think CDE is making an intentional stylistic choice to render text in this way? Or do you think it doesn't have the functionality to render it with more fidelity to the font definition? I think it's the latter. Which is why it isn't a modern system.
- coldtea 5y ago
  Not enough graphics?
  - chrisseaton 5y ago
    I don't get this response to my comment. Why do you want more graphics? How many graphics there are is a decision of the application. The fidelity of the rendering is up to CDE, and the result is poor.
    - coldtea 5y ago
      >Why do you want more graphics? I don't. You seem to do. More as in better, not as in more triangles on screen or more graphic operations per second. >The fidelity of the rendering is up to CDE, and the result is poor. Hence my response: is this poor rendering "not enough graphics" for you (as in "not fancy enough")? Because many could not care less for the "fidelity of the rendering" compared to the actual functionality. I could be black and white dithered for all it matters (in fact, many would do with just some terminals).
      - chrisseaton 5y ago
        > is this poor rendering "not enough graphics" for you (as in "not fancy enough")? I never mentioned more graphics. Only you did! Nobody here wants more graphics. You’re arguing with an imaginary person saying different things to me. I’m interested in rendering that is accurate, with fonts that are correctly hinted and rasterised and icons that are correctly composited, with a high-resolution for high-fidelity. This rendering is inaccurate and low-fidelity which makes it a poorer experience. It’s not about being fancy it’s about showing me the text and I’m working with and the graphics that are there with as much precision as possible. Compare the same fonts and icons rendered with a modern rasteriser style a modern DPI. Doesn’t compete. > Because many could not care less for the "fidelity of the rendering" compared to the actual functionality. Showing me the text and UI I’m working with is the functionality of a desktop environment. Without rendered text for me to work on… what am I doing in my desktop environment?
- blablabla123 5y ago
  It should be a doable effort to implement high-res font rendering - maybe even just the font needs to be swapped out. I think it's great when good software gets maintained and renewed which is the case here as far as I understand even if there are still some things that could be improved. That said, I like the look&feel of CDE, good to see efforts to get this working on Linux.
jmgao 5y ago
Well, for starters, anti-aliased text?
- badsectoracula 5y ago
  Not everyone likes that, personally i always disable antialiasing. Even on Windows 10 i use a registry setting (since Microsoft thought it wise to hide the UI option) to disable text antialiasing since i prefer the sharp text. Sadly many fonts nowadays do not have hinting information at all, but at least so far Firefox, etc allow me to override sites' font choices with fonts that look good with my setup.
  - GekkePrutser 5y ago
    Anti-aliasing looks great on a screen with high enough DPI so you can barely see the pixels. On a low-DPI screen it does look fuzzy. On my 4K 24" turning anti-aliasing off makes it look less crisp though because the letters don't look just right.
    - badsectoracula 5y ago
      Yeah, maybe. I do not have a very high DPI monitor and TBH i find even my 27" 1440p monitor to be too high DPI for my taste, i just couldn't find something smaller with the other specs i wanted (VA for having decent blacks and with a high refresh rate). I'll probably replace it with a ~23" 1080p monitor at some point though if i find a VA with high refresh rate... and not be curved (because for some reason 99% of them are curved). Either way i'll stick with the non-antialiased fonts :-P.
      - GekkePrutser 5y ago
        Well I would find 27" 1440p too high DPI too if I ran it at 100% scaling :) I run my 24" 4K at 200% scaling so it's effectively 1080p. Just super crisp which I like. We have super-crisp screens on our phones these days, why not on the computer?
potatoman22 5y ago
Their UI looks like it's from the 90s. The technology may be modern, but the things users actually interact with and see is certainly not.
- badsectoracula 5y ago
  UI was best in the 90s anyway, so that is a plus.
  - md8z 5y ago
    I implore you to try to use a 90s-style UI on a touchscreen, and then let's see if you want to revisit that statement...
    - badsectoracula 5y ago
      I do not use touchscreens for desktop environments (the post is for a desktop environment) and the overwhelmingly vast majority of touch screens are for mobile devices which need and have their own conventions and UX - trying to shoehorn one on another is a disaster (not that some do not try but this is also a major source of modern UI awfulness). Though having said that even with touchscreens i'd rather use a stylus (i do that for my tablet actually) and styluses work fine with 90s style UIs.
      - pjmlp 5y ago
        Laptops are the new desktops, and many of them (unless Macs) ship with touch screens.
        alxlaz 5y ago
        Ever seen those used in an office setting? I have, and it was hilarious. Everyone swore at their laptops for two or three days, and then they all scrambled for mice. No screens were touched afterwards. It looks cute in ads but truth is spending eight hours a day poking at your screen all the time just makes your hands sore, and after an hour or so, you spend half that time poking at the Undo button because you poked somewhere else than you meant by mistake. It's just a wet dream of executives who never bothered to ask their underlings how they do their puny underling work. Wherever touch screens provided considerable advantages -- e.g. in touch-operated software for medical, imaging, CNC, SCADA industries -- they've already displaced non-touch devices since the 1990s. Everywhere else, suits have been singing dirges and whining about the post-PC era for ten years now and yet lo, walk into any open-space office, and you'll find nothing but rows and rows of 24" LCDs hooked to laptops with pristine screens.

Gigachad 5y ago

It must be truely depressing being a Linux FOSS developer when any time you try to make something quality and up to todays standards, the Linux user base whinge and insult you for years. I have no idea why people still work on gnome/wayland right now. I would have left FOSS entirely if subject to that behaviour.

chrisseaton 5y ago
If you've got a bare-bones, basics, simple desktop-environment then embrace that and tell us! If you're calling it 'modern' when it everyone can see in two seconds that it isn't then you're just setting up both yourself and us for disappointment. Don't blame the reaction - blame the preventable mistakes that caused the reaction.
- Gigachad 5y ago
  I’m not calling CDE modern. I’m saying that the Linux user base has terrible preferences when it comes to software which hold back actually modern and good software like Gnome/Wayland/systemd.
  - badsectoracula 5y ago
    > actually modern and good software like Gnome/Wayland/systemd. Well, many people disagree that those are modern and good software - and while you could claim that those are "terrible preferences" the exact same can be claimed about your preferences. The point of Free Software is to allow for everyone to be in control of their own terrible choices :-P
    - Gigachad 5y ago
      Everyone is entitled to use what they want, but this goes way beyond choosing something different. FOSS devs are receiving real insults and threats constantly for simply developing something. In the end the Linux desktop is being severely held back and it takes over a decade to implement improvements like wayland which are critical for Linux to keep up with Windows and MacOS.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]