Bugzilla – Bug 668686
Terribly ugly font rendering on openSUSE 11.4 M6
Last modified: 2017-08-11 18:23:59 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.
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.
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.
Wrong component. freetype is unrelated to X.Org.
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).
*** Bug 904238 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
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.