My gripes and frustrations with Libadwaita (and GNOME)

[gwillems]

Hi,

@amethystgosling163

Libadwaita apps have no support for subpixel (rgba) rendering which makes the font rendering in Libadwaita apps look more fuzzy and therefore harder to read for people like me with poor vision, on LCD screens.

The typical issue with font rendering is a bad configuration. It’s easy to achieve a perfect pixel-fitted rendering, which looks very nice on low resolution displays:

• use a properly hinted font like “DejaVu Sans”. Absolutely avoid Cantarell or Liberation.

• make sure you use proper font rendering settings (call gtk4-query-settings to check):

  • gtk-font-rendering = manual (gtk >= 4.15 only)
  • gtk-hint-font-metrics = true
  • gtk-xft-antialias = 1
  • gtk-xft-hinting = 1
  • gtk-xft-hintstyle = hintmedium
  • gtk-xft-rgba = none

• use a proper hinting algorithm: export FREETYPE_PROPERTIES="truetype:interpreter-version=35"

This will look like this: