Bug 668686

Summary: Terribly ugly font rendering on openSUSE 11.4 M6
Product: [openSUSE] openSUSE 11.4 Reporter: Ankleface Wroughtlandmire <bummmm>
Component: X11 ApplicationsAssignee: Fridrich Strba <fstrba>
Status: RESOLVED FIXED QA Contact: E-mail List <qa-bugs>
Severity: Normal    
Priority: P5 - None CC: ciaran.farrell, forgotten_bwNirt9brK, ismail, rombert, sb56637, wolfgang
Version: Milestone 6 of 6   
Target Milestone: ---   
Hardware: i686   
OS: SUSE Other   
Whiteboard:
Found By: --- Services Priority:
Business Priority: Blocker: ---
Marketing QA Status: --- IT Deployment: ---

Description Ankleface Wroughtlandmire 2011-02-01 18:38:57 UTC 
User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US) AppleWebKit/534.10 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/8.0.552.215 Safari/534.10

Hi,

I just tried out openSUSE 11.4 M6 on my Acer 4810T laptop. I am currently running 11.3 on it, and I had to apply the subpixel patches to get nice smooth fonts. Now that the patent issue has expired, I was hoping to see nice smooth fonts by default in openSUSE 11.4. But unfortunately they're terribly ugly still, in KDE, Firefox, and LibreOffice. I would say they are unusably ugly in fact. This leaves the user with a very bad first impression of the OS. This is true even when comparing openSUSE with other Linux distros like Ubuntu, which have beutiful, smooth fonts right out of the box.

I hope this can be fixed for the release. Thanks!

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Look at your screen.
2. Grimace
3. Repeat step #1
Actual Results:  
I grimace.

Expected Results:  
I smile.
Comment 1 Stefan Dirsch 2011-02-01 20:18:39 UTC 
The subpixel rendering patent is unrelated to the TrueType bytecode patent.

  http://www.freetype.org/patents.html

Ubuntu taking the risk being sued by MS doesn't necessarily mean openSUSE, i.e. Novell also needs to take this risk.
Comment 2 Ismail Donmez 2011-03-14 15:51:53 UTC 
I believe subpixel hinting does not infringe on patents because it uses a home-made color filtering algorithm. Adding cfarrell@ for a legal opinion on this.
Comment 7 Stefan Dirsch 2011-03-17 14:49:05 UTC 
Wrong component. freetype is unrelated to X.Org.
Comment 8 Forgotten User bwNirt9brK 2014-12-06 06:48:42 UTC 
LOL this is probably the most hilarious bug reports I ever read (esp the steps to reproduce) but sadly it is totally true. Anyhow, the situation is what it is with the "litigation-based corporate environment in the US" as I read mentioned in some website about openSUSE's absence of out-of-the-box support for lots of things... But I left my distro of 10 years viz Kubuntu to come back to openSUSE for lots of technical reasons -- out-of-the-box is not really an issue for me.

Anyhow, I just wanted to add a few relevant links here:

https://bugzilla.opensuse.org/show_bug.cgi?id=906040#c1 is the currently cleanest way to get great rendering on openSUSE (running Tumbleweed here).

https://bugzilla.opensuse.org/show_bug.cgi?id=904238 explains the legal situation and this bug should probably be merged with that (or the other way around).
Comment 9 Bernhard Wiedemann 2014-12-06 09:16:40 UTC 
*** Bug 904238 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Comment 10 Tomáš Chvátal 2017-08-11 18:23:59 UTC 
More code around this was added in follow-up releases. Now the font appearance is verified by openQA.

Overall not everything can be enabled due to patents but most of the desired things were implemented.

Please open a new issue if you observe issues on latest Leap/Tumbleweed releases.