How is 7 shaping up for font rendering?

[buntunub]

Looks good to me.

[mindflash]

The last time I saw the really jagged fonts in Debian, I was running either etch or lenny - since squeeze there have been no font rendering problems which could not be easily solved by installing your chosen fonts, setting the font DPI, enabling the lcd subpixel rendering thingie and adjusting the hinting level.

I have tinkered with this a lot sinze Squeeze and I was never satisfied with fonts, until Wheezy came out with updated packages that deal with font rendering, and I enabled the "lcddefault" thing. I can understand that your hardware might work well with things like they currently are, but you gotta agree that "my experience" is not "everyone's experience". There are multiples users reporting insatisfaction with this, some failing to find a fix. I have found a fix that look good to me, but it is hard to get distro developers to listen when all we get from the community are replies from the people that want to know it better by denying any problem that don't apply to them.

Please, don't work against free software by doing this, no one is asking Debian to become Ubuntu, we only want to make it work better for us, out of the box. It's not like you will be forced to have good fonts that don't look as bad as you like them, you obviously have knowledge to deteriorate fonts the way you like it, while the ignorant and casual users will be satisfied by not having to learn the fix like I did. Basically it is just a default that could be enabled by changing a configuration file that could be packed in GNOME. But obviously this isn't done because there is a lack of Debian developers interested in polishing it for the casual user that would be very happy to have a better out-of-the-box experience (aka "Microsoft Windows replacement").

But maybe in years things will change, I tested Sid the other day and I found out that plymouth is running by default (at least when building a live CD), things like that are the way to go, since advanced users that hate cosmetics can already do a netinstall and build everything the way they like it, while letting the regular people that use computers for leisure have a nice looking, easy to use and great operating system like Debian available to them.

[confuseling]

The rhetoric might not be helping your case.

I doubt you'll find anyone who is against having nice fonts. I just doubt you'll get many people to agree on what nice fonts are, which is probably a significant part of why they change slowly in Debian.

I'm sure there's some room for improvement, and I'm also sure that it's such a subjective and confirmation bias-ridden thing that people will complain about it forever, irrespective of the defaults.

Considering how 'product' focused Gnome and Ubuntu have become relative to much of the rest of the open source world, I suspect if it was as problematic as people make it out to be, there would be some solid data demonstrating so. ABX, or simple blind preference tests - it's not like they're hard or expensive to do. I've never heard of them... maybe you have?

[PhilGil]

All Linux distros have to deal with allocating developer resources (which are always in short supply). Debian has chosen to devote fewer resources to esthetics than some other distros, and that's fine with me as I think the quality of Debian stable releases speaks for itself. In particular, devoting a lot of energy to something as subjective and hardware-dependent as font rendering is unwise.

That being said, I have been troubled by the font rendering in XFCE on one of my monitors (particularly on dark backgrounds). I could never find a setting that wasn't too fuzzy, too uneven, or too jagged. However, to my eyes, the font rendering in Gnome 3 is excellent. I think a lot has to do with Gnome 3's default font, which seems to display really nicely on my LCD monitors. Since switching my default XFCE font to Cantarell things have noticeably improved.

[Randicus]

Most people in the world don't use computers to have work done, nor find a better looking screen getting in the way of anything. Abviously you suffer of the same case of the other elitists in most distros

Using a word processor to get work done "abviously" makes me an elitist? I did not realise being an elitist is so easy. Knowing how to use apt-get update must make me a computer geek.

I have no idea who Hanna Montana is, but there is a distribution named after her that caters to the "normal" people you refer to who do not care how well their tools work, as long as the tools look pretty. You should try it. It is supposed to be awesomely pretty.

Before spewing elitism nonsense, you should look at your own statements. According to your post in the Kudos thread:

It is so nice to have something that is not bloated in any way and have documentation about fixes and configurations.

The internet is awash with people critisising those with such "elitist" views. Only elitists strive for no bloat and are willing to read documentation, while normal people want things to work out-of-the-box without having to read anything. And the bells and whistles that create the dazzling aesthetics that attract the attention of the mindless, requires the bloat elitists like you and I do not want.

So you are an elitist when it comes to important things like bloat and documentation, but not when it comes to non-existent problems like bad founts, which look the same on Debian as every other system. Very "interesting".

[cynwulf]

I have tinkered with this a lot sinze Squeeze and I was never satisfied with fonts, until Wheezy came out with updated packages that deal with font rendering, and I enabled the "lcddefault" thing. I can understand that your hardware might work well with things like they currently are, but you gotta agree that "my experience" is not "everyone's experience". There are multiples users reporting insatisfaction with this, some failing to find a fix. I have found a fix that look good to me, but it is hard to get distro developers to listen when all we get from the community are replies from the people that want to know it better by denying any problem that don't apply to them.

I dislike these vague claims. "multiple users" is bollocks... every now and again someone comes along and has a whinge, "multiple users" I think not... fonts were fine in squeeze, I stand by that. I also had good font rendering in Slackware 13.37 and I've never installed any Ms fonts or any fonts for that matter.

Please, don't work against free software by doing this, no one is asking Debian to become Ubuntu, we only want to make it work better for us, out of the box. It's not like you will be forced to have good fonts that don't look as bad as you like them, you obviously have knowledge to deteriorate fonts the way you like it, while the ignorant and casual users will be satisfied by not having to learn the fix like I did. Basically it is just a default that could be enabled by changing a configuration file that could be packed in GNOME. But obviously this isn't done because there is a lack of Debian developers interested in polishing it for the casual user that would be very happy to have a better out-of-the-box experience (aka "Microsoft Windows replacement").

If you want an "out-of-the-box experience" install a distro which provides that. Debian is a huge project and it's not all about desktop users - derivatives are there to provide all of the bells and whistles desktop users expect to have out of the box. (by the way that whole paragraph was complete and utter bollocks as well)

But maybe in years things will change, I tested Sid the other day and I found out that plymouth is running by default (at least when building a live CD), things like that are the way to go, since advanced users that hate cosmetics can already do a netinstall and build everything the way they like it, while letting the regular people that use computers for leisure have a nice looking, easy to use and great operating system like Debian available to them.

plymouth is not running by default in Sid - so you were not running Sid.