Font Rendering & Multi-Displays Works Fine on Some Distros:
It really doesn't. Sure you can run the (illegal) font smoothing code to bring the glyphs up to spec, but it still kerns text like a sweetly retarded rhesus monkey on crack. I've NEVER used anything that uses freetype for render where text kerning wasn't utter garbage.
That's a worst case scenario since Linux HATES "Windows core" fonts, but it does it with pretty much every damned non-monospace font. Open up Libre, type in the word "spacing" and then keep adding spaces before it, and watch the spacing (kerning) around the "p" and "i" dance around like a mexican jumping bean.
The SAD part being that whilst Linsux exhibits this behavior on all applicatiions, LibreOffice and OoO drag said garbage over to both OSX and Windows to a degree, making it a double-whammy.
(OoO/Libre have this issue as they do per character kerning instead of per word, same as freetype itself)Don't even get me STARTED about the spacing between words... Freetype and software written specifically for it first are incapable of even rendering the same word the same way twice on the screen. Even more pathetic turning on the (illegal) better font quality rendering actually makes the kerning worse, leaving you stuck with a choice between trash glyph quality OR trash kerning.
/FAIL/ hard in both cases and all because the freef*** FSF types go wah wah wah over the licensing issues of actual full Truetype support. You know who I mean? The nutters who created Iceweasel because Mozilla dared to trademark the Firefox name and logo?
(talk about petty nonsensical bullshit from the Church of Stallman whackjobs) The Fedora Design Suite
I hate Red Hat legacy Linux flavors. RPM's always seem to be buggy junk, nothing is in the standard *nix directories defeating the purpose of it even being a *nix-like, and the "design for suits with wallets by suits with wallets" approach of the original Red Hat Linux plagues it to this day.
But I learned *nix on Xenix, SCO, and Solaris -- so I expect things to be certain places they just aren't. Hence I'm more of a Debian guy since they have everything where I expect it to be, and the "out of box" tool choices are more familiar.
That and I had Ian's ear. He was another good friend that met a tragic end. That was a BAD couple of years for the IT community as a whole. So many important and talented people lost in such a short timeframe.GNOME3 Thing? Xfce
I have YET to encounter a WM for any *nix that feels as robust, complete, or up to date in terms of ACTUAL functionality as Windows 3.1, much less 95/98. VISUALLY they do a good job of LOOKING feature complete, but every time I try to do the simplest things It's like a trip in the wayback machine to MacOS System 2 or Windows 286.
It's the little things that are utterly broken, like the COMPLETE LACK of user feedback whilst an application is starting. I click to start the program.. nothing. Ok, click again... nothing. No disk activity, no mouse cursor change, no visual queue's like a placeholder window to say something is happening... then 5 seconds later the disk heads start screaming back and forth, so that 20 seconds later ten copies of whatever program I'm trying to start all open up at once! /FAIL/ at UI design.
Little things like stuff that should be a simple checkbox requiring 200 character long cryptic esoteric command line entries... like having pulse audio work after hibernate without having to dick around with modprobe. Like HAVING to manually edit .conf files on a new install to get anything other than 800x600 at 16 bit because *nix drivers can't even read the display information across VGA analog, much less DVI/HDMI properly.
As a desktop OS I have never seen a flavor of Linux that has caught up to the most basic functionality and user experience quality of Windows 98.
Much less it's USELESS for me in my other tasks like audio production, because of the painfully and ridiculously high audio latency. You can't have 300ms+ of audio latency by the time you turn Midi over USB and/or live mixing against soft-synth output. It's why I often joke that "what the hell is the point of them even maintaining a copy of Reaper for Linux?"
Especially since most of the good softsynths -- like the ones from Sample Modeling -- have to go through Wine to be used, adding another 50ms or so of overhead when you need the entire process to be 60ms or less.
More so when the audio drivers for professional grade hardware -- like my EMU Morpheus -- or even prosumer stuff -- like my Audigy 2 Platinum -- ranges from buggy and unreliable to outright crippled. So much hardware is listed as "supported" when it should literally be listed as "incomplete crippleware".
... and It's not like I don't keep trying different distros every few months. I ALWAYS end up back on Windows because Linux is just not usable for me as a desktop OS due to a mix of giant failures in desktop UI design, the crappy font rendering technology, crippled audio, crippled poor performing video, and general obtuseness of shit being command line only that makes it feel more like a parody of the late 1970's or the 1980's.
If I wanted to waste half my life dicking around on the command line every time I start up the machine or want a new piece of software to work PROPERLY, I'd drag out my Trash-80 Model 12 and boot up Xenix.
... and it's not that I'm command-line/terminal shy. It's just this is 2020 not 1983,
we can do better!But to be fair, I came up on the microcomputer side of things during the big "war" between the Micro and Mainframe crowd, where we referred to *nix fanboys like Stallman as "know-nothing big Iron dinosaurs" and fully expected posixisms to be dead by the mid 1990's. To be brutally frank if not for Linus Torvalds 90%+ of this cryptic outdated outmoded crap would have died off over two decades ago.
Hence why I'm still not sure this is a joke:
https://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/unix-hoax.htmland I still have a copy of this on my bookshelf:
https://web.mit.edu/~simsong/www/ugh.pdf