<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > There have been a number of postings about fonts over the last few > months. But the discussion seems to me to miss the point.
Since this is kind of a meta-rant, a meta-answer seems to be appropriate... > If you install Windows, you don't have to know anything about fonts, > really. Text just looks good in all applications. Windows has a big advantage here in that there's only one way to draw things under Windows. Under Linux (and X in general), only very basic drawing primitives are offered; there are several higher-level toolkits, but this is where things start to break down. Under Windows, "prettiness" has happened once, and since every program uses the Windows toolkit, every program looks "nice". Under Linux, both the GNOME and KDE people have tried to implement "prettiness" (differently), plus there are still lots of Xaw/Xt programs out there, and things that are based on GNOME 1 vs. GNOME 2, and things that ignore the widget kits entirely...it's not hard to see why the situation kind of sucks under Linux, but it's also very hard to fix it. > If you install Debian Woody, text looks like shit, if you are used > to Windows quality. I suspect some of this depends on what you install. If you go the all-KDE route, things will probably look fine. (Well, hopefully.) If you go the all-GNOME 2 route, you'll probably do almost as well. If you go with twm and xterm as your primary UI, it'll always suck. :-) Keep in mind that X didn't even have the concept of scalable fonts until relatively recently in its history, and still doesn't have standardized support for "pretty" things like transparency and antialiased fonts. (And I'm vaguely surprised that there's not an XFree86-specific X extension for transparency, or if there is, that applications don't use it. I imagine there's a good technical reason why the standard X font drawing routines can't do antialiasing, but I'm not enough of an X guru to know that. I'm still holding out for an Emacs built on top of a modern widget kit, either KDE or GNOME 2, with antialiased font support, preferably built out of XEmacs. :-) > Select Linux-friendly devices when buying new computer > Insert Woody CD in new computer > Switch on computer > Answer questions about hardware > Select default answers to all other questions This also may be where the "maybe Debian isn't right for you" stock answer comes in. For example, Knoppix appears to be aiming for the "installs itself without asking hardware questions and gives you pretty KDE" market, while still having some Debian underneath. I'm sure other people can suggest other alternatives more aimed at this. > What does it take to fix this problem? Fundamentally, solving a Linux religious war (GNOME vs. KDE), and porting every application to the winner. :-( -- David Maze [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://people.debian.org/~dmaze/ "Theoretical politics is interesting. Politicking should be illegal." -- Abra Mitchell -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
