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Progress on Plasma

ubuntustudio.org

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Re: Progress on Plasma

#111

Post by cycloptic »

blinkingled wrote: post #98
cycloptic wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Harfbuzz isn't a GNOME project. It's used by GNOME, KDE, Chromium, LibreOffice, and several other projects. The entire open source text rendering stack depends on it at this point.

https://blogs.gnome.org/mclasen/2019/05/25/pango-future-dire... > Using Harfbuzz for font loading means that we will lose support for bitmap and type1 fonts. It's not as straight forward.

That is not related to the other article that you linked. The Type1 format is extremely old/deprecated and has been superseded by OpenType. And bitmap fonts don't even have a concept of hinting, they are just bitmaps.

Re: Progress on Plasma

#112

Post by dTal »

jerrysievert wrote: post #89

not sure why the title of this has changed. previously it was "Ubuntu Studio: Progress on Switch to KDE Plasma", which while it does not match the title on the linked site was informative as to what the post was about. it is now "Progress on Plasma" (matching the site), which given hn's diversity could mean near anything. the context is easy to figure out if you're browsing ubuntustudio.org, but difficult to figure o…

Categorically mandating the preservation of the original title verbatim, come hell or high water, is simply incorrect. On the original website, a page title comes with plenty of assumed context - it's assumed that the reader has some idea of where they are, and why they are there. On Hacker News the title must stand on its own merits, amongst a jostling diaspora of contexts. How often do you see comments saying "I thought this was going to be about "? Too often I say! Change the rules! Viva la revolución!

Re: Progress on Plasma

#113

Post by seqizz »

type0 wrote: post #93
mixedCase wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some people want or need a tailored experience that they don't have to configure much if at all. e.g. making Linux suitable for near-real time audio work, restricting Linux to a set of well-tested stable packages for high uptime, making it as close to a standards desktop experience where the expectations are set by Windows and MacOS, making it sandbox absolutely everything by default because you have reasons to be ex…

> I use Arch btw. Why not Gentoo? It's Fun Too

> Fun Too

I see what you did there. Btw good to see funtoo also still alive.

Re: Progress on Plasma

#114

Post by cookiecaper »

otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #60
orf wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly - a desktop experience should track the current desktop hardware. If you have 512mb of ram and a pentium 4 then too bad. Let’s not hobble the future because of the past.

There' no such thing as a "current desktop hardware" in 2020. Specs haven't been changing in like a decade.

Yeah, a large reason Vista got lambasted so widely was because netbook form factors were gaining steam at the same time, and Microsoft had built it with the assumption that most new users would be using contemporary desktop-class machines. The old assumption that users would throw out their old equipment and upgrade to something in step with Moore's Law was no longer valid.

Re: Progress on Plasma

#115

Post by blinkingled »

cycloptic wrote: post #111
blinkingled wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://blogs.gnome.org/mclasen/2019/05/25/pango-future-dire... > Using Harfbuzz for font loading means that we will lose support for bitmap and type1 fonts. It's not as straight forward.

That is not related to the other article that you linked. The Type1 format is extremely old/deprecated and has been superseded by OpenType. And bitmap fonts don't even have a concept of hinting, they are just bitmaps.

Pango is a Gnome project. They moved to using Harfbuzz and as a result dropped support for bitmap fonts. That hurt not just Gnome/GTK users but whoever else uses Pango and there was user pushback about it.

Pango prior to version 1.44 used kerning hints provided by FreeType but now makes use of the hints provided by HarfBuzz. But HarfBuzz doesn't support all of the hints supported by FreeType and thus a regression for some users depending upon their font hinting preferences and what visibly looks the best to them and their displays.

Remember Pango is a Gnome project.

Re: Progress on Plasma

#117

Post by flukus »

orf wrote: post #24
bananamerica wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As you said, you got a PC with 32GB of RAM and a laptop with 16GB.

Exactly - a desktop experience should track the current desktop hardware. If you have 512mb of ram and a pentium 4 then too bad. Let’s not hobble the future because of the past.

According to the steam hardware survey (https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey) current desktop hardware is 8GB of RAM or less, that's what half of all users have. There are more people on 4GB or less than there are with with more than 16GB. Your machine is the statistical outlier here and shouldn't be catered to at the expense of everyone else.

Re: Progress on Plasma

#118

Post by cycloptic »

blinkingled wrote: post #115
cycloptic wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is not related to the other article that you linked. The Type1 format is extremely old/deprecated and has been superseded by OpenType. And bitmap fonts don't even have a concept of hinting, they are just bitmaps.

Pango is a Gnome project. They moved to using Harfbuzz and as a result dropped support for bitmap fonts. That hurt not just Gnome/GTK users but whoever else uses Pango and there was user pushback about it. Pango prior to version 1.44 used kerning hints provided by FreeType but now makes use of the hints provided by HarfBuzz. But HarfBuzz doesn't support all of the hints supported by FreeType and thus a regression for…

The original article you linked was not about Pango or Gnome and did not mention those things at all other than a vague reference to a different bug which may or may not even be related. As far as I can tell no developers have done a full (and time-consuming) investigation of this issue to actually get a full picture of what is going on. I would encourage you to actually read the articles you link and their primary sources, because what you're saying is somewhat contrary to what has already been said. Repeatedly airing grievances about decisions that have already been made years ago is, in general, not helpful to you or anyone else.

The user pushback was unnecessary because this is a deeper technical issue than just these fonts. Additionally bitmap fonts are still usable as long as they are appropriately converted to OpenType.

Re: Progress on Plasma

#119

Post by blinkingled »

cycloptic wrote: post #118
blinkingled wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pango is a Gnome project. They moved to using Harfbuzz and as a result dropped support for bitmap fonts. That hurt not just Gnome/GTK users but whoever else uses Pango and there was user pushback about it. Pango prior to version 1.44 used kerning hints provided by FreeType but now makes use of the hints provided by HarfBuzz. But HarfBuzz doesn't support all of the hints supported by FreeType and thus a regression for…

The original article you linked was not about Pango or Gnome and did not mention those things at all other than a vague reference to a different bug which may or may not even be related. As far as I can tell no developers have done a full (and time-consuming) investigation of this issue to actually get a full picture of what is going on. I would encourage you to actually read the articles you link and their primary s…

I’m not sure what point you’re trying to disagree / take issue with- I thought it was the point about Gnome developers and their heads for which I gave plenty of backing information - there was no technical reason not to continue to use Freetype hinting until Harfbuzz supported it or give distros option to choose. But instead in both cases they just said screw your users who need that. Nothing you have said so far refutes my point that Gnome developers don’t care about their users.

Re: Progress on Plasma

#120

Post by seba_dos1 »

qppo wrote: post #18
fit2rule wrote: post #4

As a longtime user of Ubuntu Studio on a very productive DAW, this is welcome news - XFCE has certainly been a great choice for the last few years, but KDE has a lot more to offer, especially now the resource usage is comparable. I have a feeling it'll also sway MacOS DAW users to take a closer look at just what Linux has to offer pro audio users - amazing latency specs, even when compared to Mac, which has tradition…

Is this a joke? There's so much overhead in getting a working setup compared to MacOS, and only one of the major DAWs even runs natively on it. The tools are far from "excellent" compared to the offerings on MacOS and even Windows. I can't even get the Jack server to start on my Ubuntu machine. It's not snobbiness, the software isn't there and what is there is user hostile. I know the reply to this comment is "have y…

> I can't even get the Jack server to start on my Ubuntu machine.

Interesting. Recently I've tried JACK to play with Jamulus - and having used it the last time around 10 years ago, I expected a long configuration battle to make it work.

But... it just worked. PulseAudio automatically suspended itself and JACK simply started and worked fine. I could even make PA output to JACK with a single command, so all the other apps continued to work simultaneously without any wrappers or other tricks to route them to JACK.

It was almost disappointing :P

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