7 ms·

What does one have to do to get as clear and pretty of a UI as that on the modern desktop OSes? Everyone switched from bitmaps to vectors over a decade ago and

What does one have to do to get as clear and pretty of a UI as that on the modern desktop OSes? Everyone switched from bitmaps to vectors over a decade ago and now everything is fuzzy, antialiased, scalable, flat, hard to make out. Of course you can always run dwm on linux with a hodgepodge of makeshift utility apps, write your own keybinds to set your brightness and volume and other such inanities, but in order to get a 'complete' desktop experience you kinda have to opt-in to GNOME/KDE which are trying to do the same things as Apple or Microsoft, aesthetically speaking. And tough luck if you actually use Apple or Microsoft to begin with. I tried running bug.n and it seems to not work in win10, let alone win11.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
unicornporn 4y ago
> but in order to get a 'complete' desktop experience you kinda have to opt-in to GNOME/KDE which are trying to do the same things as Apple or Microsoft, aesthetically speaking. This is so true and that's why I deep inside mourn the end of this UI era.
dkonofalski 4y ago
>Everyone switched from bitmaps to vectors over a decade ago and now everything is fuzzy, antialiased, scalable, flat, hard to make out. That makes no sense. Bitmaps have a fixed pixel density while vectors are infinitely scalable.
- xvolter 4y ago
  Sounds like he used to be younger and needs to see an optometrist.
  - NikolaNovak 4y ago
    Not necessarily; I fired up some old devices last month, and the way their bitmap icons and apps and screens appeared, can only be defined as "Crips" and "Sharp". I'm not saying prettily or beneficially so! But they were definitely very stark and constrasty (let alone colourful and "stand-out-ish"!) holding them next to my modern phone or PC. I don't think "Vector vs bitmap" is necessarily the cause - more of design sensibility. When I look at the lineup of google apps on my phone which all look EXACTLY the same (3 primary colours in random rotation; I can only effectively use / distinguish them if I memorize location of icon), and then the same as slack and my son's daycare app which also use swirls of same 3 primary colours; and when I compare my Windows desktop and icons and browsers to old apps - there's a definite brutal sharpness to old stuff.
    - throwanem 4y ago
      Because the pixels are larger on old display devices, I suspect.
- shadowgovt 4y ago
  Back in the day, the fixed pixel density of the bitmaps was 1-to-1 aligned with the pixel density of the monitors. Every line was crisp and clean because there was no antialiasing across partial pixels. The world in which we now live allows for a lot more crispness when it matters (because the pixel density approaches indistinguishable-by-the-human-eye-at-viewing-distance), but with the tradeoff that UIs designed to work at whatever scale on whatever monitor with whatever DPI do a lot of aliasing, and things tend to look, sometimes, just a tad muddier. Especially when vectorized icons get drawn in a rendering pipe that passes through the graphics accelerator.
- dkarl 4y ago
  Vectors will scale to any pixel density, but they look irritatingly fuzzy at the lower pixel densities you commonly see in large widescreen monitors. Obviously it's not an apples-to-apples comparison, but decades ago bitmapped fonts could give you crisp text on any monitor, and in 2022 I'm using a popular, >$1300, very favorably reviewed monitor, and the text is ever-so-slightly fuzzy. It's plugged into my Macbook Pro right now, and the difference in how well the text renders on the two displays is plain. I guess as soon as Apple started making laptops with 300dpi screens, it became okay to render fuzzy text on any screen that wasn't 300dpi.
  - jassmith87 4y ago
    The problem is you have it plugged into a macbook. Apple doesn't support subpixel anti-aliasing in any of its latest releases. Your monitor looks so fuzzy because Apple has removed the capability to make it not look so fuzzy.
    - js2 4y ago
      Context: https://mjtsai.com/blog/2018/07/13/macos-10-14-mojave-removes-subpixel-anti-aliasing/ https://mjtsai.com/blog/2018/07/13/macos-10-14-mojave-remove...
    - p1necone 4y ago
      This is only part of the reason. The other reason is that Apple doesn't actually do fractional UI scaling, they only ever render into a framebuffer at whole integer multiples of an internal "native" resolution and then scale down this framebuffer to the actual monitor resolution afaik (they still render natively to this multiplied resolution - no doubled pixels or anything like that). This results in less crisp output than you would get if you actually rendered vector based UI at the exact monitor resolution or if you natively rendered bitmap art 1:1 with the monitor resolution. This approach makes sense when you're only using Apples monitors because they can optimize their internal "native" resolutions for the handful of actual native resolutions they offer, but it falls apart when you start plugging in external third party lower dpi monitors. (I believe this is also the same approach that Gnome 3 uses to do (experimental, with a toggle) non integer multiple UI scaling.)
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- quietbritishjim 4y ago
  If you have e.g. a diagonal line from a vector graphic then it will almost always be antialiased (i.e. light grey pixels along the edge of the black pixels - or maybe there aren't even any black pixels and they're just dark grey, which might look fuzzy to some). The alternative is that you convert the vector line with a "nearest neighbour" pixel algorithm (or cleverer but fundamentally similar algorithms e.g. [1]) but then you get the aliasing artefacts that anti-aliasing is meant to avoid. For example, two parallel lines that are rendered 2.5 pixels apart might end up having a gap between them that alternates between 1 and 2 pixels along its length, which looks even worse. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bresenham%27s_line_algorithm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bresenham%27s_line_algorithm With hand-designed pixel graphics, this isn't a problem because you can manually choose to draw everything an integer number of pixels apart or avoid certain constructions altogether.
m_eiman 4y ago
> now everything is fuzzy, antialiased, scalable, flat, hard to make out. Use a high-DPI screen, for starters.
- giobox 4y ago
  For fuzz, anti and anti-aliasing issues, you can sometimes make them worse with a HiDPI display. All of these issues really boil down to render resolution not integer scaling to the display resolution. If the render resolution is an integer multiple of the display resolution or vice versa, you will generally always get beautiful crisp rendering - this is exactly the approach Apple adopted, and is why they had to use some slightly less common resolutions like 5k on some devices - 2560x1440/"QHD" has integer scaling factor of exactly 2 for a 5k display etc. The problem though is that outside of Apple devices, almost no hiDPI display will neatly integer sale. The vast majority of Hi-DPI monitors on sale today are 4k, and only 1080p really has a useable integer scaling factor there. 1080p of "useable" screen real estate on a 4k monitor is going to make all UI elements too big usually though... So you are forced to non-integer scaling and images that will not cleanly map to the grid of pixels in the monitor, which is where the fuzz and anti-aliasing etc starts... 1440p of "usable" space does not cleanly map to a 4k monitor, but many people run them this way. 5k is frankly a brilliant resolution for high quality ~200ppi style HiDPI rendering on 27 inch displays with 2x integer scaling for macOS and Windows especially, its tragic the resolution hasn't become more mainstream.
  - m_eiman 4y ago
    Yes, it’s a shame that there are only two 5K 27” displays to choose from, and both are expensive. The industry has dropped the ball on this for years, all those 32” 4K screens may be cheap but they’re no use to me…
    - michaelmrose 4y ago
      On Linux Step one plug in 4K 27" monitor. Step two set scaling factor for gtk/java apps to 2. KDE/QT apps can figure out the correct DPI without hassle. Step three set fonts smaller or larger if desired. On Windows plug in 4K 27" monitor. Text doesn't look in my opinion quite as nice as Linux but it isn't fuzzy, small, or giant. Possibly font rendering could look nicer if I bothered to tweak it but since its basically boot to steam I see little reason to bother. I keep hearing this argument that 4K somehow doesn't work or looks shitty and only 5K Mac displays provide an acceptable high dpi experience and I feel like I'm getting transmissions from an alternate universe where nobody had to scale UIs from screens that varied in DPI by a factor of 3 for almost 20 years. Long before 4K screens.
bad_good_guy 4y ago
> What does one have to do to get as ... pretty of a UI Are you being intentionally disingenuous? It is objectively not a pretty UI, it's a functional but quite ugly one.
- masswerk 4y ago
  I think, this is a rather relative statement. Modern UIs would have been perceived as toy-like and not fit for business back then. It all comes down to what we are used to. (That said, personally, I always favoured the System 7 UI over OS 8.)
- toephu2 4y ago
  I think it's quite subjective actually. I like the UI. "beauty is in the eye of the beholder"
- marssaxman 4y ago
  Ugliness and prettiness are inherently subjective concepts. There can be no such thing as "objectively not a pretty UI"!
cobbaut 4y ago
> but in order to get a 'complete' desktop experience you kinda have to opt-in to GNOME/KDE try XFCE, it works.
Joeri 4y ago
What does one have to do to get as clear and pretty of a UI as that on the modern desktop OSes? Buy a retina mac ;) I kid but only partly. Running at integer (2x) scaling on a 200 dpi screen makes everything perfectly crisp. Anti-aliased text no longer appears blurry and lines are rendered at exact pixel boundaries. Those old bitmap art displays didn’t do any scaling. Every pixel appeared exactly as someone drew it, with crisp boundaries. It’s the scalable part of vector graphics that fuzzes things up.
ynniv 4y ago
Most of the time when I notice poor font antialiasing it's due to the OS resolution or subpixel antialiasing not precisely matching the panel. An old OS will not have subpixel antialiasing, so if it looks correct you could try disabling subpixel/ClearType, or testing a bitmap font. If the old OS still looks wrong, your panel may be pretending to be 4k and actually stretching things a little. Also, any OS level scaling is likely to mess with things, so check that it's either 100% or 200%.
usefulcat 4y ago
I switched to a Mac recently, prior to that I'd been using Elementary OS. I'm still using the same monitor though (a large 4k display), so any visual differences are quite obvious to me. The Mac is definitely fuzzier than Elementary; that clarity is the main thing I miss. It seems pretty obvious that modern MacOS is designed for high DPI displays.
michaelmrose 4y ago
You might be overestimating the complexity of creating such a hodgepodge. i3wm = tiling window manager lxappearance = set gtk theme and settings qt5ct = set qt5 theme and settings kvantum more settings for qt ponymix cli for pulseaudio that sucks less than pactl pavucontrol gui mixer nm-applet tray applet that lets you select a different network i3status-rust nicer and more powerful status line for i3bar rofi a launcher that looks like nice and is more powerful To this add all the other apps you already use. The thing about this hodgepodge is that there really isn't much to be said about integration as the different components don't require or benefit from such. The connection between such are so bare direct and obvious that there isn't much of a question how to put it together. You change a line in your i3 config to start a different app at startup or trigger a different one with a keybinding. If you had done so 5 years ago you could be using much the same configuration now and much the same configuration 5 years hence. I guarantee you that whether you use KDE or Gnome or Windows you are liable to spend a day here or there tweaking your environment even if Bob in accounting doesn't.
qbasic_forever 4y ago
XFCE is pretty complete and can be tweaked into just about any retro desktop experience you want--i.e. you can make a panel feel like a start menu and task bar, or sit in the middle like a dock, have both a dock and top bar panel, etc. If you really want you can also tweak some settings to totally disable antialiasing and switch to bitmap font rendering. On modern semi-high DPI displays (like a 14" 1920x1080 panel) it isn't that great though as most bitmap fonts are far too small to be readable (~8-12 pixels tall). For the most crisp and clear text, even crisper than old bitmap stuff, you really want a high DPI display in the 4k+ range. Try using a modern mac and you will be blown away at how clear and sharp the text renders.
btrettel 4y ago
With respect to the anti-aliasing on Linux, I run Xfce, which easily allows one to control the font anti-aliasing in the Appearance settings under the Fonts tab. I assume that GNOME and KDE have similar configuration settings. You can also get the same sort of controls in fonts.conf [0] for applications that don't respect Xfce's settings, like Firefox, as I recall. I could make everything as sharp as I'd like with the right settings. In my experience, basically every window manager has some 90s-esque style as well. [0] There's more information buried in here: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Font_configuration https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Font_configuration
jasomill 4y ago
Ha! I remember feeling the same way when Apple started replacing the classic Mac system fonts (Chicago, etc.) with newer, anti-aliased alternatives ca. Mac OS 8. A couple dozen years later, I guess I'm used to it.
tomc1985 4y ago
MATE Desktop is still pretty simple and great
opan 4y ago
I use Terminus 9pt whenever/wherever I can easily get it going for this reason. It's funny seeing all the replies from people who don't get it. Other fonts really do all look blurry next to bitmaps. I've switched terminal emulators at least once due to Pango dropping bitmap support. Still works in foot and alacritty. Probably others as well, but I also need Wayland support.
kevingadd 4y ago
I don't get it. Windows 10 is all crisp 1-2 pixel lines and rectangles for me with sparse use of gradients, and the windows theming engine (used in XP, 7, etc) was all based on bitmaps.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

unicornporn 4y ago

> but in order to get a 'complete' desktop experience you kinda have to opt-in to GNOME/KDE which are trying to do the same things as Apple or Microsoft, aesthetically speaking. This is so true and that's why I deep inside mourn the end of this UI era.

dkonofalski 4y ago

>Everyone switched from bitmaps to vectors over a decade ago and now everything is fuzzy, antialiased, scalable, flat, hard to make out. That makes no sense. Bitmaps have a fixed pixel density while vectors are infinitely scalable.

xvolter 4y ago
Sounds like he used to be younger and needs to see an optometrist.
- NikolaNovak 4y ago
  Not necessarily; I fired up some old devices last month, and the way their bitmap icons and apps and screens appeared, can only be defined as "Crips" and "Sharp". I'm not saying prettily or beneficially so! But they were definitely very stark and constrasty (let alone colourful and "stand-out-ish"!) holding them next to my modern phone or PC. I don't think "Vector vs bitmap" is necessarily the cause - more of design sensibility. When I look at the lineup of google apps on my phone which all look EXACTLY the same (3 primary colours in random rotation; I can only effectively use / distinguish them if I memorize location of icon), and then the same as slack and my son's daycare app which also use swirls of same 3 primary colours; and when I compare my Windows desktop and icons and browsers to old apps - there's a definite brutal sharpness to old stuff.
  - throwanem 4y ago
    Because the pixels are larger on old display devices, I suspect.
shadowgovt 4y ago
Back in the day, the fixed pixel density of the bitmaps was 1-to-1 aligned with the pixel density of the monitors. Every line was crisp and clean because there was no antialiasing across partial pixels. The world in which we now live allows for a lot more crispness when it matters (because the pixel density approaches indistinguishable-by-the-human-eye-at-viewing-distance), but with the tradeoff that UIs designed to work at whatever scale on whatever monitor with whatever DPI do a lot of aliasing, and things tend to look, sometimes, just a tad muddier. Especially when vectorized icons get drawn in a rendering pipe that passes through the graphics accelerator.
dkarl 4y ago
Vectors will scale to any pixel density, but they look irritatingly fuzzy at the lower pixel densities you commonly see in large widescreen monitors. Obviously it's not an apples-to-apples comparison, but decades ago bitmapped fonts could give you crisp text on any monitor, and in 2022 I'm using a popular, >$1300, very favorably reviewed monitor, and the text is ever-so-slightly fuzzy. It's plugged into my Macbook Pro right now, and the difference in how well the text renders on the two displays is plain. I guess as soon as Apple started making laptops with 300dpi screens, it became okay to render fuzzy text on any screen that wasn't 300dpi.
- jassmith87 4y ago
  The problem is you have it plugged into a macbook. Apple doesn't support subpixel anti-aliasing in any of its latest releases. Your monitor looks so fuzzy because Apple has removed the capability to make it not look so fuzzy.
  - js2 4y ago
    Context: https://mjtsai.com/blog/2018/07/13/macos-10-14-mojave-removes-subpixel-anti-aliasing/ https://mjtsai.com/blog/2018/07/13/macos-10-14-mojave-remove...
  - p1necone 4y ago
    This is only part of the reason. The other reason is that Apple doesn't actually do fractional UI scaling, they only ever render into a framebuffer at whole integer multiples of an internal "native" resolution and then scale down this framebuffer to the actual monitor resolution afaik (they still render natively to this multiplied resolution - no doubled pixels or anything like that). This results in less crisp output than you would get if you actually rendered vector based UI at the exact monitor resolution or if you natively rendered bitmap art 1:1 with the monitor resolution. This approach makes sense when you're only using Apples monitors because they can optimize their internal "native" resolutions for the handful of actual native resolutions they offer, but it falls apart when you start plugging in external third party lower dpi monitors. (I believe this is also the same approach that Gnome 3 uses to do (experimental, with a toggle) non integer multiple UI scaling.)
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
quietbritishjim 4y ago
If you have e.g. a diagonal line from a vector graphic then it will almost always be antialiased (i.e. light grey pixels along the edge of the black pixels - or maybe there aren't even any black pixels and they're just dark grey, which might look fuzzy to some). The alternative is that you convert the vector line with a "nearest neighbour" pixel algorithm (or cleverer but fundamentally similar algorithms e.g. [1]) but then you get the aliasing artefacts that anti-aliasing is meant to avoid. For example, two parallel lines that are rendered 2.5 pixels apart might end up having a gap between them that alternates between 1 and 2 pixels along its length, which looks even worse. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bresenham%27s_line_algorithm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bresenham%27s_line_algorithm With hand-designed pixel graphics, this isn't a problem because you can manually choose to draw everything an integer number of pixels apart or avoid certain constructions altogether.

m_eiman 4y ago

> now everything is fuzzy, antialiased, scalable, flat, hard to make out. Use a high-DPI screen, for starters.

giobox 4y ago
For fuzz, anti and anti-aliasing issues, you can sometimes make them worse with a HiDPI display. All of these issues really boil down to render resolution not integer scaling to the display resolution. If the render resolution is an integer multiple of the display resolution or vice versa, you will generally always get beautiful crisp rendering - this is exactly the approach Apple adopted, and is why they had to use some slightly less common resolutions like 5k on some devices - 2560x1440/"QHD" has integer scaling factor of exactly 2 for a 5k display etc. The problem though is that outside of Apple devices, almost no hiDPI display will neatly integer sale. The vast majority of Hi-DPI monitors on sale today are 4k, and only 1080p really has a useable integer scaling factor there. 1080p of "useable" screen real estate on a 4k monitor is going to make all UI elements too big usually though... So you are forced to non-integer scaling and images that will not cleanly map to the grid of pixels in the monitor, which is where the fuzz and anti-aliasing etc starts... 1440p of "usable" space does not cleanly map to a 4k monitor, but many people run them this way. 5k is frankly a brilliant resolution for high quality ~200ppi style HiDPI rendering on 27 inch displays with 2x integer scaling for macOS and Windows especially, its tragic the resolution hasn't become more mainstream.
- m_eiman 4y ago
  Yes, it’s a shame that there are only two 5K 27” displays to choose from, and both are expensive. The industry has dropped the ball on this for years, all those 32” 4K screens may be cheap but they’re no use to me…
  - michaelmrose 4y ago
    On Linux Step one plug in 4K 27" monitor. Step two set scaling factor for gtk/java apps to 2. KDE/QT apps can figure out the correct DPI without hassle. Step three set fonts smaller or larger if desired. On Windows plug in 4K 27" monitor. Text doesn't look in my opinion quite as nice as Linux but it isn't fuzzy, small, or giant. Possibly font rendering could look nicer if I bothered to tweak it but since its basically boot to steam I see little reason to bother. I keep hearing this argument that 4K somehow doesn't work or looks shitty and only 5K Mac displays provide an acceptable high dpi experience and I feel like I'm getting transmissions from an alternate universe where nobody had to scale UIs from screens that varied in DPI by a factor of 3 for almost 20 years. Long before 4K screens.

bad_good_guy 4y ago

> What does one have to do to get as ... pretty of a UI Are you being intentionally disingenuous? It is objectively not a pretty UI, it's a functional but quite ugly one.

masswerk 4y ago
I think, this is a rather relative statement. Modern UIs would have been perceived as toy-like and not fit for business back then. It all comes down to what we are used to. (That said, personally, I always favoured the System 7 UI over OS 8.)
toephu2 4y ago
I think it's quite subjective actually. I like the UI. "beauty is in the eye of the beholder"
marssaxman 4y ago
Ugliness and prettiness are inherently subjective concepts. There can be no such thing as "objectively not a pretty UI"!

cobbaut 4y ago

> but in order to get a 'complete' desktop experience you kinda have to opt-in to GNOME/KDE try XFCE, it works.

Joeri 4y ago

What does one have to do to get as clear and pretty of a UI as that on the modern desktop OSes? Buy a retina mac ;) I kid but only partly. Running at integer (2x) scaling on a 200 dpi screen makes everything perfectly crisp. Anti-aliased text no longer appears blurry and lines are rendered at exact pixel boundaries. Those old bitmap art displays didn’t do any scaling. Every pixel appeared exactly as someone drew it, with crisp boundaries. It’s the scalable part of vector graphics that fuzzes things up.

ynniv 4y ago

Most of the time when I notice poor font antialiasing it's due to the OS resolution or subpixel antialiasing not precisely matching the panel. An old OS will not have subpixel antialiasing, so if it looks correct you could try disabling subpixel/ClearType, or testing a bitmap font. If the old OS still looks wrong, your panel may be pretending to be 4k and actually stretching things a little. Also, any OS level scaling is likely to mess with things, so check that it's either 100% or 200%.

usefulcat 4y ago

I switched to a Mac recently, prior to that I'd been using Elementary OS. I'm still using the same monitor though (a large 4k display), so any visual differences are quite obvious to me. The Mac is definitely fuzzier than Elementary; that clarity is the main thing I miss. It seems pretty obvious that modern MacOS is designed for high DPI displays.

michaelmrose 4y ago

You might be overestimating the complexity of creating such a hodgepodge. i3wm = tiling window manager lxappearance = set gtk theme and settings qt5ct = set qt5 theme and settings kvantum more settings for qt ponymix cli for pulseaudio that sucks less than pactl pavucontrol gui mixer nm-applet tray applet that lets you select a different network i3status-rust nicer and more powerful status line for i3bar rofi a launcher that looks like nice and is more powerful To this add all the other apps you already use. The thing about this hodgepodge is that there really isn't much to be said about integration as the different components don't require or benefit from such. The connection between such are so bare direct and obvious that there isn't much of a question how to put it together. You change a line in your i3 config to start a different app at startup or trigger a different one with a keybinding. If you had done so 5 years ago you could be using much the same configuration now and much the same configuration 5 years hence. I guarantee you that whether you use KDE or Gnome or Windows you are liable to spend a day here or there tweaking your environment even if Bob in accounting doesn't.

qbasic_forever 4y ago

XFCE is pretty complete and can be tweaked into just about any retro desktop experience you want--i.e. you can make a panel feel like a start menu and task bar, or sit in the middle like a dock, have both a dock and top bar panel, etc. If you really want you can also tweak some settings to totally disable antialiasing and switch to bitmap font rendering. On modern semi-high DPI displays (like a 14" 1920x1080 panel) it isn't that great though as most bitmap fonts are far too small to be readable (~8-12 pixels tall). For the most crisp and clear text, even crisper than old bitmap stuff, you really want a high DPI display in the 4k+ range. Try using a modern mac and you will be blown away at how clear and sharp the text renders.

btrettel 4y ago

With respect to the anti-aliasing on Linux, I run Xfce, which easily allows one to control the font anti-aliasing in the Appearance settings under the Fonts tab. I assume that GNOME and KDE have similar configuration settings. You can also get the same sort of controls in fonts.conf [0] for applications that don't respect Xfce's settings, like Firefox, as I recall. I could make everything as sharp as I'd like with the right settings. In my experience, basically every window manager has some 90s-esque style as well. [0] There's more information buried in here: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Font_configuration https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Font_configuration

jasomill 4y ago

Ha! I remember feeling the same way when Apple started replacing the classic Mac system fonts (Chicago, etc.) with newer, anti-aliased alternatives ca. Mac OS 8. A couple dozen years later, I guess I'm used to it.

tomc1985 4y ago

MATE Desktop is still pretty simple and great

opan 4y ago

I use Terminus 9pt whenever/wherever I can easily get it going for this reason. It's funny seeing all the replies from people who don't get it. Other fonts really do all look blurry next to bitmaps. I've switched terminal emulators at least once due to Pango dropping bitmap support. Still works in foot and alacritty. Probably others as well, but I also need Wayland support.

kevingadd 4y ago

I don't get it. Windows 10 is all crisp 1-2 pixel lines and rectangles for me with sparse use of gradients, and the windows theming engine (used in XP, 7, etc) was all based on bitmaps.