The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience [LWN.net]

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 16, 2011 5:00 UTC (Wed) by tetromino (guest, #33846)
In reply to: The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience by sramkrishna
Parent article: The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

> Unless it's related to eye sight issues, you shouldn't need to tweak a font.

Are you serious? I need a way to change the default font settings because:

a. The hinting and subpixel rendering options that GNOME 3 picks by default look terrible on my monitor. And short of creating a comprehensive database of all monitors and laptop panels out there, there is no way for GNOME 3 developers to know what settings a particular user will need.

b. In a truly stunning regression for i18n and l11n efforts, the new default UI font in GNOME 3 (Cantarell) covers *only* the basic Latin alphabet and a few extended Latin symbols for the Central European languages. Other characters will be rendered by the system's fallback font (for alphabetic scripts, this will most likely be DejaVu). And let me tell you, seeing a mixture of Cantarell and DejaVu, which are compatible neither in metrics nor in style, in every window title bar makes me want to vomit and then gouge out my eyes with rusty cutlery.

c. Independent of the the above points, Cantarell's aesthetics are not above reproach. In other words: I am sure some GNOME developers may like but, but I personally find it rather ugly. As they say, de gustibus non disputandum est; and the users who have a different taste in typography should have an easily accessible option to pick a font that, in their opinion, does not look awful.

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The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 16, 2011 6:10 UTC (Wed) by sramkrishna (subscriber, #72628) [Link] (2 responses)

Yes, that criticism is valid regarding regression. I don't have any defense for that other than it should be fixed.

As for the hinting, I'm hoping someone from GNOME can jump in and talk about the fonts. I will admit that I don't have any particular defense as I've stated above. You shouldn't be having to mix fonts of different metrics. That's wrong. We can't do anything with the interface now as we are past the visual freeze. We can address after the release. In the mean time, please file bugs and state your opinion.

If you're interested in helping improve the experience then you need to file bugs.

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 22, 2011 9:00 UTC (Tue) by blujay (guest, #39961) [Link] (1 responses)

> If you're interested in helping improve the experience then you need to file bugs.

This is another fallacy that many FOSS projects operate under: that it is the responsibility of anyone with a suggestion or complaint to file a bug report.

The developer of a piece of FOSS should care enough about it that if he reads a post on a forum somewhere that describes a simple, obvious problem, he should either look into the problem himself or file a bug report himself.

The Random Internet Guy who posted on a forum or mailing list already expressed the problem. He already took the time to explain it. If it's a problem worth fixing, it's a problem the devs should care about enough to take it from there. (If it's unreproducible or obscure, that's different.)

I'm operating under the assumption that developers of FOSS projects which are serious enough to have bug trackers care about their projects and want to make them the best they can be. If this isn't the case with a project, then I wouldn't expect a developer to care about a bug report, either.

This is not to say that users should never be asked to file bug reports. My point is that, especially with large rewrites, if developers really care about quality and meeting users needs, they ought to be actively seeking reports of problems and addressing them proactively, not refusing to act until someone does the right paperwork.

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 22, 2011 9:13 UTC (Tue) by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784) [Link]

It wouldn't be so bad if people didn't hide their bug trackers behind passwordwalls.