PenTile, RGBW Quad, etc -- basically everything except plain old RGB stripes. Of all the possible display layouts, SPAA really only works with one (or it has to be re-designed for each, which realistically will never happen).
The stats I've seen are that most Mac users, as of this year, are on @2x displays.
Apple said during WWDC that the change was made to support a wider variety of display technologies and scaling modes. It’s an odd choice considering they still sell the non-retina MacBook Air.
Forcing app developers to live with the same lowest-common-denominator aesthetics that most users see, will make them more likely to raise the bar for the aesthetics on lowest-common-denominator devices.
It's the same reason that video game developers shouldn't be allowed to have powerful GPUs. They need to be testing how the game looks (and works) for most people, not for a group of people only slightly larger than themselves.
Do you think most developers are using a non-retina screen? Compared to the general population I bet they skew very heavily towards newer, retina machines. Which means they'll barely notice anything. This is just plain lowering the bar, not raising the average.
I'd say most developers are docking with an external screen, and there are very few external screens that are retina. So yeah, I'd say most developers are using a non-retina screen.
Because "retina" can imply pixel doubling, making it more like an extra-crisp 1920x1080. The typical 1440p screen is nice and big, and replacing it with such a setup at the same physical size would needlessly cut down on what you can fit. If you could trust non-integer scaling to work properly then 4K would resoundingly beat 1440, but that's a pipe dream right now.
You can get the best of both with a 5K-6K screen, but that's currently a very expensive price point not on most people's radar.
Hmm, I can't reply to Symbiote for some reason. But yes, 2560x1440 screens and other wide variants are really prefer by gamers or people who want high refresh rates. 4k is limited to 60Hz, unless you use DisplayPort 1.4 and some very new monitors.
There are quite a few users who prefer the wider format screens for a variety of reasons.
That's a silly question. More stuff fits in more pixels. Even if you have to compensate for readability by scaling fonts larger to make text the same size as it was on the lower dpi screen, the end result isn't actually equivalent to the lower dpi. It still works out that the higher dpi screen is on average more functional due to more things fitting on screen. Especially on dual/triple 27" external monitors on my desk. They are large and I am close to them, and a mere 1440 vertical pixels would be tolerable but crap when better is available. I usually have 4 to 10 terminal windows open where I want to see as much code and documentation and log output as possible, not a movie.
So get your own monitor. I understand that many employees make the decision that they will not pay for equipment, to be true. However it's still a decision.
I get my devs whatever they want for hardware, within reason. $500 or $1000 monitors? No questions asked. The price of hardware that will last years is nothing compared to the value of engineer happiness and productivity, especially when compares to how costly good engineers are in the USA and Canada.
4k screens mostly run at 60hz, making them terrible for anything but watching movies. I don't like coding on a screen where I can see the refresh as I scroll.
These are cheap 27" screens though, which are not ideal for macOS, which is optimized for running at either 100% or 200% zoom. It's a shame that 4K screens at 24" and 5K screens at 27" are so hard to find. Apple uses these panels in their iMac line, but refuses to sell them as standalone displays.
I don't think most game shops do. Their devs typically are constantly comparing rendering on mid nVidia and AMD cards, as well as Intel integrated. The Indie titles have to do so because they know their games go for $9~$15 and they need to look consistent or at least decent or a lot of off-the-shelf laptops. Triple-A titles can afford larger huge testing teams that take on various Intel/amd/nvidia cards and report consistency issues.
Sure if the title has a huge AMD or nvidia logo when it starts, it's going to use a lot of specific functionality from that card, whatever those shops pay them specifically to advertise for. But devs need to ensure titles at least look okay and run at at least 60fps to get the largest sales audience.
Subpixel AA only works when you know exactly what the output pixel layout is, when you aren't being scaled by some other technology and when you aren't showing the same thing on disparate displays, and it requires you to adapt whenever the screen rotates, which is common on tablet-style devices. Also, some people (like me) can see the discoloration it imbues. So I'll be glad to see it go.
(Attempts to disable it tended to get various results in various operating systems, but rarely consistently disabled it)
They did, but it was inconsistent [1]. Microsoft had the same problem [2]. In both cases, poorly-documented APIs meant many applications still used subpixel antialiasing.
Really? Somehow that 'only' has included every LCD monitor I've used for more than a decade. Windows AA is more aggressive, but it is still a huge improvement over the jagged over-hinted font rendering you get without ClearType.
No AA makes sense for DPI greater than about 300, but for anything less, with visible pixels, which is probably most non-4K monitors, I would bet most people prefer AA on. In general, people always prefer AA for 3D and all sorts of other rendering, at lower DPI.
So, this is a typical Apple decision to abandon anyone who doesn't have the latest device from them.
Personally i prefer to disable antialiasing and if possible use bitmap fonts designed for clarity. Sadly almost nothing supports properly bitmap fonts these days (assuming it supports them in the first place - i think only GDI and X11 core does, but those are increasingly ignored by programs) and even when you can find support, finding good bitmap fonts is hard because it looks like most bitmap fonts are converted from outline fonts - but with jaggies.
As for what i consider a good bitmap font, in Windows MS Sans (the one you could find in Win9x, it was removed in later versions of Windows and aliased with MS Sans Serif which is an outline font), plain Courier and Fixedsys. On Linux i like the console font that you get when booting Debian (not sure what is called) as well as the Terminus fonts. On X11 i like the helv* fonts (usually registered as adobe helvetica - honestly, why is font registration on Xorg such a clusterfuck?) and some of the Fixed fonts (the smaller ones mainly, the larger are a bit too jaggy). On Mac... pretty much all of the original Macintosh fonts. I also like the "WarpSans" font that OS/2 (and eComStation) has, it is very compact and i like compact fonts (although i'm not fan of a few details, like the w being a bit too jaggy).
> but it is still a huge improvement over the jagged over-hinted font rendering you get without ClearType.
There is no font smoothing at all (the jagged fonts), and then there is grayscale font smoothing, and then there is coloured font smoothing. Apple is switching from coloured to gray-scale, which like OP, is great for me personally as I can see all the colours in the other approach.
The reason being that it tends to want to push pre-rendered bitmaps around, and sub-pixel anti-aliased pre-rendered bitmaps don't work well under rotation...
Signed up for HN (again) just to vent about this terrible news. This is a change that will be hard for me to live with, and I will probably end up selling all my Apple gear.
This is the same change/downgrade that occurs if you go to System Preferences-->General-->Use LCD Font Smoothing When Available.
I did this and the fonts on my 5K iMac display looked horrible. Just atrocious. My plan is to not upgrade to Mojave, and then within a year or so sell all my Apple gear and move back to Linux.
I don't understand Apple's thinking, but I believe a lot of people will do the same.
It does affect Retina devices. That's the whole point. I made the same change that Apple is going to make and the fonts looked far worse (almost unreadable). You can observe the same if you have an Apple device by going to: System Preferences-->General-->Use LCD Font Smoothing When Available.
Apple is removing sub-pixel anti-aliasing for all devices, not just non-Retina ones.
I've been on the beta for a couple days (using a 2016 12" MacBook) and I haven't noticed anything. There's a visible difference when I disable LCD font smoothing in settings, but not much changes besides fonts appearing somewhat thinner.
I installed Mojave beta on my MacBook Pro. It is the same thing. The fonts look identical to toggling off the setting "Use LCD font smoothing when available" in High Sierra. And by the same thing, I mean they look very bad in Mojave.
Maybe this person's eyesight is better or worse than yours, or perhaps just different. You might be surprised what some people are bothered by, or trained to spot, that others aren't...
Thanks, that's much better. I think it shows that Mojave renders the fonts clearly better: check out for instance 'll' in 'ullamco'. Generally, almost identical pictures though.
No they won’t. People don’t notice this stuff. I pointed out the weird font smoothing issue in Finder to my best mate – a professional photographer – and even then she barely had any idea what I was on about.
Mojave beta installed, and the fonts look equally atrocious. They are blurry, indistinct...and just bad. One of the reasons I bought a 5K iMac (three of them, actually) was to have great fonts. I am beyond angry that I will now have to sell them.
Can you post some screenshots? I find hard to believe that fonts on a retina display can be blurry and indistinct, when the antialiasing text weight is almost the same.
Those screenshots were both in Waterfox. I also tried in Safari (didn't take any shots, though) and the fonts looked identically bad in that browser as well.
The normal UI's fonts are also worse -- about the same as the browser screenshots. Fonts are indistinct and blurry, and very light. All the result of greyscale aliasing only, I presume.
Either Apple disable "LCD font smoothing" for retina displays, or there is a bug somewhere. Because in Mojave on a non retina screen "LCD font smoothing" has got the same weight as before. And on your screen it clearly doesn't.
I hope it is a bug. If the weight were the same, it'd at least perhaps be tolerable on a Retina screen. I know the technical reasons, but I just don't understand why Apple can't leave it alone for desktop systems.
They don't remove font smoothing. They switch it from subpixel level to grayscale only. Technically subpixel should produce better results then grayscale. But IMO the subpixel antialiasing in macos looks horrible. So you might not even see the difference as it looks exactly as horrible as before.
I'd be more outraged if Windows removed cleartype, because their subpixel font antialising actually works and is configurable.
Greyscale anti-aliasing is far inferior to sub-pixel. The fonts look much worse.
BTW, I did install Mojave beta and the fonts look just terrible even on a Retina display. Shockingly bad. I can't believe Apple is doing this. I just bought a new 5K iMac a few months ago. I wish it were still in the return period...but in other news, I am now selling all of my Apple equipment as it's pointless to have it. Without the great fonts I purchased it for, it's so much junk to me.
In addition to the MacBook Air and normal non-4K external display, it seems that this will also affect projectors. Therefore, it seems that presentation using macOS Mojave will only make your slides/keynote look bad and less professional. Moreover, the projector is not something you can upgrade. It is usually preinstalled in whatever venue where you give your presentation, and totally outside your control.
Many projectors don't use RGB striped subpixel grids anyway. They use color wheels or multiple chips to achieve full coverage, and in that case you want grayscale antialiasing.
And on top of usually not using RGB stripes, they also often use software keystone correction, which means that you don't know the native pixel grid anyway.
So there's no disadvantage for projectors, not at all.
PDFs looks very blurry and dirty since High Sierra (Mojave too). In Preview.app and in Safari. You can compare it if open PDF in Chrome (looks sharp in chrome).
https://imgur.com/a/TRpk1Oi
So are you saying the High Sierra PDF rendering catastrophy is not a bug but a precursor of this „feature“?
If that is true and the blurred text is going to be the new normal, I do not see how any professional user looking at type all day long can stay on their platform.
Every time I open PDF I think about install El Capitan back. One thing that stops me is picture-in-picture mode. I use it heavily on youtube and it is only in Sierra and later.
Is the first image for real? Like, that's not a temporary "hold on a second I'm working here" rendering that's replaced after a split second with a proper version?
So what's the solution here? Buy a new monitor if we want to use up-to-date versions of macOS?
Anyone who uses Apple's FCPX or Logic knows we'll have to update to Mojave because eventually we'll try to open the latest version of said software and be told "You must be running Mojave to open this"
I'd really ditch Apple because of stunts like this, but I really love Logic and FCPX so I'm stuck with it.
I hope we are all somehow misunderstanding how terrible this is.
The idea that they would downgrade the display support so that non-retina monitors--- and let's be serious, that is nearly all monitors that people dock into at work or at home-- are going to look worse in Mojave, is almost too absurd to be true.
I want to see this for myself.
Does anyone know if you can simulate this now, without installing the beta? Or if you can install or somehow use the beta without nuking what you already have?
Edit: I am still on Sierra, because the buzz around High Sierra made it sounds like it was a bad idea to upgrade. This is sounding more and more like Mojave is a no-go as well.
I do not think this is an accurate way to simulate the issue reported. This simulation will look worse than the actual issue, which is not present on 4K+ displays.
OS X has never done gamma correction properly with subpixel antialiasing. Instead, it “dilates” the shapes slightly, but this is actually wrong. I suppose half the problem is getting used to the new, correct, line weights. This is more problematic on retina displays because the dilation affected the weight far more than the gamma deviations would’ve at high resolution.
The quality of sub-pixel AA depends A LOT on the physical parameters of the display. It's basically the OS saying "I know that pixels aren't actually square, and I'll use that knowledge to better digitize the font's curves." That worked fine when everything was CRTs or the same technology of LCD displays. However the faults of sup-pixel AA show through pretty strongly on the variety of modern displays (OLED vs AMOLED vs. ...), and the rotation capability of tablet displays. Apple is in the process of switching LED technologies across their products.
That said, if there's anyone in the position to exploit their knowledge of the ACTUAL physical display and its sub-pixel layout, it's Apple. I'd expect Windows or Android to drop sub-pixel AA... but iOS/macOS? I'm mystified.
I think Windows has a feature to configure the subpixel arrangement, what about MacOS? Sure they know about the internal screen, but not the one you plug in.
Don't screens tell the OS about their physical characteristics? At least the native resolution and the physical screen size (or dpi) are available to the OS somehow. I'd guess the sub-pixel arrangement might also be.
That's EDID you're talking about and AFAIK, it doesn't support that. On my android now but if anyone wants to fiddle around with what their screen provides, on Linux there is read-edid and parse-edid to query and interpret the raw data directly. It's not terribly much since it's 256 bytes max iirc.
Subpixel AA was never about CRTs; they do not have a consistent mapping between logical pixels and physical rgb holes in the shadow mask. It was always about LCDs
Having actually been in the graphics industry before LCDs were prevalent, we did sub-pixel rendering. It just wasn't built in as a standard feature in OS font rendering until LCDs made it necessary.
You can simulate this by adding the `-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased` CSS rule to any website when using Safari or Chrome. Lots of websites already do this though, so you can use the value `subpixel-antialiased` to revert the text to that mode instead.
To really appreciate the difference, I recommend turning on screen zoom with ctrl-scroll in the accessibility system prefs. You’ll see the effect of SPAA as colouring on the left and right edges of text.
I fucking hated Lion when I got it on a new MacBook in 2012. I had been running Snow Leopard on my Hackintosh. I decided to buy a new Mac when I went overseas and Lion removed expose and replaced it with that (still) terrible Mission Control garbage. I spent a few weeks trying to downgrade it to 10.6 and it was impossible.
Final Cut X was ... something else. Anyone who claims you just need to get use to is must not like having good tools. It's a terrible video editor and Apple killed off their only pro video tool.
Around that time I just ran Linux in a VM on my Mac and got into tiling window managers. I tried a bunch and liked a lot of the, but eventually settled on i3 (which I still use today). I ran OpenSUSE at work. Someone at work was throwing out an old IBM dual Xeon and that became my primary box and I used my MacBook as a Windows gaming laptop, up until it was stolen:
but I still hate the hardware and it's more difficult to get Linux on a MacBook than any other x86 laptop I've owned, including two Dells, an HP and an MSI.
I don't want Apple to go away because we do need competition in the market, but their operating system and hardware seriously needs to stop being a pile or poop.
I won't have anything bad said about FCPX. Yes, they botched the launch by releasing an unfinished, beta-quality first version. But every criticism of it was addressed within short order and it's solid as hell now.
The only reason why anyone continues to hate it today is because they're used to the terrible, horrible and stupid way that all the other NLEs work (including FCP6). It can be disconcerting to use FCPX because everything seems like a fancier version of iMovie, that it therefore must be not for "pros" or it's missing lots of "pro" features.
But it's not. Terrible, horrible and stupid NLE design isn't a feature. FCPX is the first one to get it right, but the rusted on Premiere / Avid "professionals" refuse to see it.
This is the software equivalent to moving exclusively to USB-C. 18 months after the 2016 MacBook Pro, the vast majority of hardware currently in use still requires a dongle, and 18 months from Mojave's release, the vast majority of external monitors in use will still look blurry without subpixel AA.
Someone at Apple really seems to believe in pain as a motivator. And it may work in the short term, but in the long term, it always drives customers to other platforms.
Microsoft has been having similar font rendering issues for years, so I guess Apple felt left out of this club. They spent all this awesome work & research creating ClearType and then when Vista(?) happened they suddenly decided screw everything, let's switch back to grayscale antialiasing for no reason... now everything on the taskbar (or seemingly anything DWM-rendered) is grayscale-smoothed, which makes me want to tear my eyes out.
> let's switch back to grayscale antialiasing for no reason...
The actual reason is that switching to hardware-accelerated font compositing means that you lose out on subpixel antialiasing, because of complications related to blending. The classic way of doing subpixel text rendering means you need three distinct alpha channels, and most hardware only lets you supply just one. There are ways of hacking around this with dual-source blending, but such a feature was not supported at the time of Vista. In Windows 8 and up, DirectWrite can now support hardware-accelerated subpixel AA, and the OS does so by default.
> The actual reason is that switching to hardware-accelerated font compositing means that you lose out on subpixel antialiasing
But what was this crazy obsession with hardware-acceleration of every rendered character and its grandmother? While you're busy Flippin' 3D I get it, you can temporarily render aliased Wingdings if that makes your life easier, but at least for Pete's sake I just want to enjoy not tearing my eyes out the other 99.99999% of the time. If there was anything slow or poorly implemented in XP it honestly wasn't the taskbar font rendering.
(Not angry at you; just annoyed at the situation they caused.)
> DirectWrite can now support hardware-accelerated subpixel AA, and the OS does so by default.
I can't substantiate my comment with academic sources, but here's my memory from the past decade: the people designing interface guidelines for mobile operating systems decided that carefully designing static visual assets for UIs was a waste of time (with similar technical complexity reasonings due to the number of different display resolutions/pixels per inch/aspect ratios)
Market context: Microsoft yearned to implement the Metro UI they'd been researching for a long time (Zune was its public appearance) — and Vista kind of soured people on Aero by osmosis; third-party Android applications always had consistency issues, so Google wanted to mandate something that would be generic enough to work (and be easily implemented) for all apps but also look distinctly specific to Android; Apple wanted to signal some shift to upscale high fashion (parallel to "everything is black glossy glass and aluminum" in its industrial design) and understood fashion-minded upscale as a mix of modernist typography with neon bright contemporary color schemes.
To make up for the boring visual aesthetic that often resulted, they recommended adding animations throughout apps. Most of these animations aren't very helpful, but they keep the user distracted for a moment.
I chose my words carefully: font compositing, not rendering. Font rendering still happens in software, but in order to composite it correctly into the surface requires DSB. I (hopefully) shouldn't have to explain the advantages of using hardware acceleration for app rendering in general.
I'm aware of Slug (and other GPU font rendering techniques). Slug, however, doesn't have subpixel AA (it doesn't make sense for it to, since its main goal is fitting in a 3D scene), and requires a moderately expensive (read: hard to do realtime) up-front bake process which converts the font into a pair of textures.
> then when Vista(?) happened they suddenly decided screw everything
What? ClearType was basically introduced in Vista and refined in Win 7.
Win 8 is when they start to remove it for various applications (UWP, and some others) due to its poor performance on retatable devices (tablets mainly).
> Someone at Apple really seems to believe in pain as a motivator.
I think they simply believe they're large enough player to make such calls unilaterally, and that the rest of the industry will follow. And I fear they might be right - such decisions enter into the calculations of more "commoditized" vendors like peripheral manufacturers when they design next iterations of their products.
I mean, that's why removing the headphone jack is such a big deal even for people not using iPhones. Not just because we sympathize with iPhone owners - but because Apple is big enough to make this stupidity a new standard everywhere.
I'm not sure. As more devices and peripherals have gained USB-C, lots of horror stories of chargers frying devices and other catastrophic failures have shown up. This isn't my wheelhouse, but just from the reading I've done, it sounds like USB-C is a difficult-to-implement standard and that peripheral makers are more interested in getting something out the door quickly and cheaply. With the amount of power that USB-C can drive, this is risky.
If the end result is that you can't tell if plugging into your friend's charger is going to blow up your phone (or video game console), I think USB-C is going to fall apart.
Cheap chargers and cables that aren't compliant are not unique to USB-C, and why we have things like UL. There are a lot of people using quite frankly dangerous USB-A chargers for their cell phones because they found them obnoxiously cheap.
If you want to use usb 3.1 gen 2 speeds, you pretty much have to use Type C. The only other alternative is a full usb type a connector or the awkward micro b connector (which is rate).
Actually Apple is definitely big enough to force change—they've done it multiple times in the past. Apple helped push the original USB standard into common use with the original iMac. Obviously it would have happened eventually, but the iMac made the transition occur much faster than it would have otherwise.
The problem with the USB-C standard is that USB-A now transcends far beyond the personal computer industry. It's now a power adapter standard for mobile phones and all sorts of gizmos, gadgets and accessories for the home and car. USB-A isn't going anywhere for a long time.
> Apple helped push the original USB standard into common use with the original iMac.
I don't think that's true. USB became ubiquitous because literally every PC included it after 1998. Yes, it might have helped that USB also worked with Macs, unlike previous connectors.
The USB port did start appearing on some PCs before the iMac—largely because Intel put it in its chipsets—but it was practically abandonware with precious few peripherals prior to the iMac. When the flood of peripherals did arrive, many of them were styled with translucent cables and casings to match the iMac, even when sold for Windows PCs.
> Actually Apple is definitely big enough to force change—they've done it multiple times in the past.
In many cases it's arguable whether Apple forced a change or it was a case of Apple "skating where the puck is going" and doing something that was inevitably going to happen given time.
I conceded as much in the paragraph you quoted from. What Apple did is force the market to move faster that it would have otherwise.[0]
Similarly, if Tesla never existed the electric car would still have been an inevitability. Perhaps it would have taken another decade to emerge. Perhaps two decades. But it would have eventually. On electric propulsion, Tesla is most definitely just "skating where the puck is going."
In both cases—Tesla and Apple—they're not just skating where the puck is going, they're also in control of the puck, even if only a little bit.
[0] And thinking about it further, I shouldn't have conceded the assumption that USB's dominance was inevitable. It seems that way in hindsight but was it really? It could have fizzled like Firewire. It is entirely possible that new incremental standards—perhaps an ultra-fast nine pin serial port protocol—could have filled the gap before another connector emerged to dominate.
I'd argue it is both. Apple isn't going to convince an industry to move to a closed standard, however they may accelerate the move to new open standards. For instance, moving away from floppy disks to compact disk media, and moving from serial/parallel/PS2 ports to USB.
Often these technologies are stuck until there is a first big adopter. Now Google, Apple Macs, and most of Android is behind USB-C for instance, there will be a lot more accessories that use it. Right now IMHO it is being held back mostly by cost - micro-usb and an A to micro-B cable are still the cheapest parts.
Recently switched to Manjaro Deepin operating system. Everything looks nice and quite polished once inside the OS. I have a great pull down terminal. I can snap windows side by side. Almost everything is configurable without digging into configuration files. It's a rolling release so you don't get stuck on a particular version of a package until the next major release. You get the latest stable release of all software monthly or sooner using the built in package manager.
Most of my development tools I install using the package manager. Git, docker, docker-compose, vitualbox, openjdk, node, go, python, (dont use pip use pacman to install python packages), (sdkman for kotlin, gradle and maven), visual studio code, postman,(dbeaver as gui for SQL, Cassandra, mongo, big table, redis, neo4j). Download and install intellij and sublime. WPS office is better than Microsoft Office in my opinion. There's also the AUR repository which are community built packages that can also be enabled in the package manager settings. Everything is really stable. Built in screen recorder and screenshots with annotations. You can map your keys to work like a Mac or a Windows computer even on a Mac. The latest Gimp is actually really good (not yet available on macos). There's also Krita for image editing but doesn't handle large PSD files well. Overall the development experience is much less frustrating and docker runs natively which means everything is much faster. I've had a lot of luck running music production DAW and VSTs and games under Wine. There's a great guide on the techonia website about how to dual boot Manjaro Deepin safely on a MacBook Pro. The best part is I can have this environment on any computer so I can have the latest intel processor if I want and the OS won't make my company issued external monitor look like crap. Unfortunately Apple runs more like a fashion company than a technology company. Making people feel compelled to buy the latest product.
Attempting take this idea seriously, I just catalogued apps I have open right now that I know/suspect have no good equivalent on Linux:
* Safari - might seem unnecessary, but it's a lot of the web
* Discord - I hear they have a Linux version in alpha, but...alpha
* iTerm - best there is after years, why the hell can't Linux win at this?!
* 1Password - guess I use the CLI? ugh.
* iTunes - largely used for watching movies
* Messages - This is surprisingly nice to have on the desktop
* Microsoft Outlook - guess you are forced to use the web client
* Xcode - heh
Stuff I didn't expect to see but was pleasantly surprised to see:
* Spotify
* Hipchat
* Zoom
* Skype
I could live without Discord, Messages, Safari, iTunes and Outlook if I got motivated (Outlook I have to have, but the web client is halfway decent). That leaves Xcode, iTerm and 1Password as dealbreakers. We know one of those isn't going to change!
I'm of course not including the apps I use less often but really like when I need them, like Lightroom, Photoshop, Illustrator, Keynote, Excel/Numbers, OmniGraffle, Sketch, and Things.
I think Linux is safe from me, except as the system I have next to my daily driver, and which I use for Windows (when I need to look at something there) and dual boot for Tensorflow.
For passwords I use enpass. It stores and encrypts passwords in your own personal cloud storage account e.g. Dropbox Google drive. Desktop version is free. Mobile version has a once off fee to buy the app.
For office I use WPS office (word/excel/power point). It has tabs for documents and I have never had document compatibility issues (like I have had with libre office). I believe office 2013 runs under Wine too if you really need office.
I prefer the web clients for email anyway.
I use wavebox to integrate web based chat and email with the operating system for notifications.
Safari uses WebKit so it's very similar to the engine chrome uses - but Google forked at some point.
Deepin Terminal is an amazing terminal.
Can't help you with Xcode unless you switch programming languages :)
It would be great if Adobe released Linux versions of their products.
I don't do much video editing but I think there are good options on Linux.
Try it as a challenge I think you might be pleasantly surprised - if you use all the above apps how far Linux has come. Most of these apps work on Mac as well so you may find a few new good tools.
Safari - either Google Chrome or Chromium (depending on how open you like things) can keep pace with Safari in terms of general usability and extension ecosystem. At worst I think you'd find the experience on par, but when I owned a Mac, I found Google Chrome to be more performant than Safari on the regular, and its Linux build is just as quick. A lot of Linux folks recommend Firefox as well but I still am not convinced it beats Chrome in terms of out-of-the-box magical "Just Works" factor.
Discord - The client may be alpha, but this works just fine honestly. I've never had a problem. This is largely because the desktop app is Electron based, so it's running on a web browser anyway; it's very, very cross platform friendly. Slack too, if that's your thing.
iTerm - There are MANY good terminal clients for Linux. I personally use Terminator, which I find has a good balance of power features and stability. I particularly enjoy its terminal broadcasting implementation, but I'm in the unusual position of working on many parallel servers in tandem during my day job, so this feature is very important to me.
iTunes - If it's just for movie watching, I've found VLC to be perfectly servicable. mPlayer is also quite popular and there are many frontends.
Messages, Outlook - Here you've got a fair point. Outlook in particular is a pain point; there are workarounds to get it working in Thunderbird and Evolution, but they're just that - workarounds. Anything beyond basic email will need the web app; fortunately the web app isn't _terrible_, but yeah. Fair complaint.
Xcode - If your goal is to build Mac / iOS apps, there is no substitute thanks to Apple's EULA. For everything else, pick your poison; there are more code editors and IDEs on Linux than one can count, many of them excellent. Personally I'm happy with Sublime Text (paid, worth every penny) and a Terminator window, but I hear VSCode is also excellent, which is odd considering that's a Microsoft endeavor. (Now if we could just get them to port Outlook...)
> Google Chrome or Chromium (depending on how open you like things) can keep pace with Safari in terms of general usability and extension ecosystem
Google Chrome's extension ecosystem is undoubtably far, far ahead of what Safari has. As for usability, and…
> I found Google Chrome to be more performant than Safari on the regular
People use Safari because it integrates so well with macOS, is performant, and doesn't kill resources (CPU, RAM, battery, you name it). No other browser comes close, even on other platforms. Apple's just spent too much time here optimizing their browser that nobody else can match it (maybe Edge on Windows?).
> There are MANY good terminal clients for Linux.
iTerm just has everything and the kitchen sink. Like, it has some flaws, but it just does so many things that I haven't seen any other emulator do. Plus the author is really smart (he's at the top of the comments currently, if you want to check his stuff out)
> Xcode
Xcode can be surprisingly nice for C/C++ development, when it decides it wants to work.
Also peep Tilix. It's like the GTK answer to Konsole: super configurable yet accessible, with a sharp GUI. I think its arguably better than Konsole, except it doesn't scale as well as Konsole in Plasma (Plasma scaling is wretched).
Their Safari comment implies the need isn't due to a preference for Chrome, but rather for front-end testing. So yes, Chrome might make a fine daily driver, but those of us who have to occasionally code for the web need access to all of these browsers.
That depends on the environment. I assume you're talking about Outlook as a frontend for an enterprise Exchange setup?
If your mail server admin configures IMAP and SMTP correctly, it's a breeze to get it set up (you will need SSL though). Use "DOMAIN\user.name" as username together with your AD password (and for team/shared mailboxes, use DOMAIN\user.name\mailbox.name, where mailbox.name is the cn or sAMAccountName attribute of the mailbox AD entry). Thunderbird can handle everyday emailing as well as responding to calendar events that way; I'm not sure about integrating "real" calendar stuff. Auto-completion of mail addresses must be done separately in Thunderbird, you'll need the AD structure information (root DN, plus the DN of your AD account so you can log in).
What you'll miss is forwarding rules access, but that can be done via webmail if the need arises.
I recently switched my primary machine to Linux and was pleasantly surprised to learn that 1Password has a web version (which does require a subscription) and the 1Password X extension for Chrome and Firefox to go with that.
The idea of swapping away from macOS seems more enticing by the day, given the development directions of macOS (this is just one of the many nails; the main one is that Apple is likely going to merge macOS with iOS [or the other way around]).
Discord works perfectly fine in a web browser. IIRC the platform-specific clients are just running a web browser themselves. Would rather use PWA then.
As for iTerm, you don't need that when you use i3 but perhaps you can specify the features you need.
1Password, I recommend Bitwarden. Cheaper, open source, you can even run an open source backend.
Messages, no idea why you want that. I only use WhatsApp for IM, and even that is just a web app.
For development I recommend Sublime Text. You can use it for free, though I did buy it (as someone else commented; worth every penny).
Skype for Linux is actually fallen behind to the other ports. Though I don't use Skype I heard complaints about that.
I made the switch to Linux (Netrunner Rolling with KDE) in the last year and have not looked back. It is definitely not for everyone as some things just have no good replacements, but it suits all my needs.
I do a ton of things in the browser, love the availability of a good Terminal at my fingertips (same as macOS), develop webapps and love the simple availability of a full local web server stack to develop on and so on. I use LibreOffice for my very few "Office" needs. I use Firefox as my primary browser (moved away from Chrome to Firefox before I made the switch to Linux). I use Visual Studio Code as my primary editor. I use Krita for my very few photo editing needs - simple stuff really like cropping or color picking. That's about it. Everything else happens in the Browser or on the command line.
As Netrunner is a derivative of Manjaro and thus Arch it's very simple to access a plethora of packages from their AUR system. It's like Brew on steroids.
With MacOS, I believe, they still know they're the best. As much as I'd want to move away from Apple because of their recent maneuvers, there's nothing that comes close to MacOS - it just works great. Users will see more appreciation if other Unix-like operating systems will catch up on their GUI. Once a BSD or Linux (I'd really want it to be a BSD!) gets a great UI, I'm switching.
GNOME is great, I personally like it as much as macOS. Try running it on Fedora. The latest Ubuntu also ships GNOME by default but I haven't tried it and I'm not sure if it's a tweaked version (if it's tweaked it's surely for the worse).
I don't see how they could "know they're the best" when Windows is the best. If you want the CLI tools from 1979 that come with your Mac, you can easily add them to Windows, the best and most widely used desktop operating system on the planet.
Seriously, there's nothing that comes close to Windows - it just works great and the manufacturer doesn't pull the rug out from under your feet every 5 years like Apple does. If there were something better I'd switch to that too, but there's not.
And even worse than outdated CLI -- the keyboard is a tool from like two hundred years ago (barely changed from movable type tech). Can't believe all these computers still use such old technology. Just because it works is a terrible reason for not updating it.
Hmmm, well I'd say that beyond a very superficial comparison with "keyboards" from 200 years ago (if there even were such a thing), modern keyboards have changed a lot and for good reason.
I'm sure glad that my ancestors decided to move out of their caves.
I am actually quite happy with USB-C: Charging has become easier since I can has the ports on both sides of my MacBook. Dongles are necessary, however, they have been necessary for as long as I can remember with Macs. Of course, a native HDMI port would still be great …
macbook pro users of 8 years here, aside from ethernet/DVI at an office not once have I used a dongle, and tbh those two dongles aren't all that bad because i would just leave them at my desk.
I love my magsafe charge + 2 thunder + 2 USB + HDMI ports and can't imagine life with fewer.
Or any GNU/Linux distribution, which actually offer a superior developer experience in my opinion.
People complaining about their Macs type posts constantly top HN. Usually the comments are filled with further moaning about how things have been so bad for so long with Apple etc., usually accompanied by threats of moving to another platform.
I bought a chrome book on sale for 140 bucks. I thought it was a toy but probably fine for email.. fast forward.. that chromebook has outlasted my other desktop and laptop.. it's been beaten up.. tossed around.. I've loaned it to computer illiterate relatIves who use it with zero problems, and it has never gotten jacked up with adware. Now when I'm on the road I write javascript on it, disconnected from the net. Some of the best money I've ever spent.
I use a USB-C only macbook pro and I absolutely love it, I would not want to go back to a laptop with a lot of IO.
The main reason is that when I have to move somewhere, it is only one thing to remove (and then add back in) compared to the 5 minute shuffle I used to do.
There have only been one or two situations in a year where it caused a slight annoyance.
That is nonsensical, nobody is putting a gun to your head to use all the ports. Having them available is definitely better than not. And if you prefer dongles, keep using them.
i have 4 usb-c on my macbook of that one i used for a usb-c to displayport to connect to my 4k monitor and the other is used for a dongle, i dont know what this guy is talking about, to be honest i would love to have one regular usb to not to have to carry the adapter or dongles everywhere.
There's on MAJOR difference though - you'd have to deliberately buy a USB-C only Mac to enter the dongle world. This change will be pushed to everyone with a software update and we'll be constantly nagged to update with popups if we don't.
"Someone at Apple really seems to believe in pain as a motivator. And it may work in the short term, but in the long term, it always drives customers to other platforms."
Interestingly, it drove me to buy three maxed-out 11" MBAs before they were discontinued.
So I have not left the Apple computer platform but I won't be buying another laptop until I burn through these three - which could be as late as 2022-2023 ...
As for fonts/aliasing - I just won't upgrade past Sierra (or whatever ... I use Mavericks now ...)
Its’s not a bug. It was announced as a change at WWDC. It’s believed to be a consequence of the move to merge iOS code into macOS. iOS doesn’t support sub-pixel antialiasing.
You most certainly can. The effect is applied when shading the text, so it does appear in screenshots, as would any other in-software AA technique (AFAIK).
You can test this yourself in the browser. For instance, toggle subpixel AA using the CSS -webkit-font-smoothing property in Safari. There is a clear visible difference that you can screenshot. On some websites with a light-on-dark theme, disabling subpixel AA with CSS was an important part of improving visual consistency between browsers. It’s also important to explicitly control when working with animations that changes text scale or rotation.
It’s easier to see with an enlarged screenshot, but you can totally see the difference at 1x.
I don't know what you can toggle with CSS but I'm pretty sure you can't replicate 'thing rendering a font with knowledge of your physical display' with 'bitmap made of pixels and some CSS'.
The “knowledge” is applied when the text is rendered to the bitmap, not when the bitmap is pushed to the display. You’d be right if the effect happened quite late in the rendering process. It doesn’t — it happens really early.
Screenshots aren't very useful for meets-the-eye visual quality comparisons of subpixel AA unless your display has the same pixel arrangement and resolution as the display the screenshot was rendered on. Even then, there's probably other issues.
I agree that they work for technical comparisons of rendered output.
Maybe I'm confused about something then but you seem to be telling me the subpixel AA is positionally independent. I can take the subpixel AA-ed bitmap and plop it in a page, open it on some other browser and OS and be certain everything is the same down to each coloured subpixel. You'd think every, say, vertical line would have the same colour artifacting, if that were the case. But they don't.
They do? They're just coloured pixels. When you open a bitmap image on different PCs and screens and display it at 1x wrt the monitor's pixels, you would expect every pixel to have the same colour across every PC/screen, no?
The pixels will be the same on every PC/screen. The perceived sharpness/blurriness won't be–the whole point of the "color fringing" is that the subpixels of any particular display have an arrangement that can be exploited to add additional sharpness: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0f/Antialia...
If the display you're viewing the image on has a different subpixel layout than the one that the image was rendered for, it won't look sharper.
Enlarge the page using browser zoom. Subpixel AA will make the text look red on one edge and cyan on the other. Without it, the text is perfectly greyscale. This is visible even with extensive bilinear filtering.
One guys dell monitor doesn't - subjectively - render input from a beta OS as pretty as it did the non-beta, and suddenly everybody is bringing out the pitchforks.
If you read through the comments, you'll find this link buried, which shows a developer showcasing the difference in the new AA. Basically font-smoothing is grayscale-only in Mojave.
If I take a screenshot of some text and zoom in, I can see the colours, just like in the video. If I zoom back to normal size and change the saturation to zero (only greyscale) I cannot see a change in sharpness of the text on my 2009 macbook pro.
>Basically font-smoothing is grayscale-only in Mojave.
This is actually better for me. I wrote to Steve Jobs a long time ago and asked him if he could switch to gray-scale font smoothing because the tricks they use with colours don't actually work with people like me who are red green colour blind. The end result was that text on apple products looked terrible to me and I couldn't use any of their products until the retina displays came out. In windows, you can use grayscale font smoothing easily.
Anyway, he replied "we don't have any plans to do this" or something like that. Turns out I won in the end.
Very strange, this has been configurable in System Preferences > General (currently "Use LCD font smoothing when available", previously there were more choices) for ages.
Yes I remember back in Leopard it wasn't just a checkbox, but a drop down menu allowing you turn it off completely or choose "Light", "Medium" or "Strong." I've always found the Strong setting the best for me and have kept it ever since. (There's a `defaults write` command to set this value still, but the effect is a lot less noticeable on Retina.)
For most people who don't like it, it makes the text look like you are watching one of those 3d movies without the glasses. It looks all blurry with red and blue fringing.
They give justification for it in the video linked somewhere else in the comments. They say "it works better on a wider variety of displays" in reference to the gray-scale approach. I am guessing they are probably switching to oled across all of their products.
> I released a build of iTerm2 last year that accidentally disabled subpixel AA and everyone flipped out. People definitely notice.
On a Retina display at least I find that the most striking difference is that most text appears to have a lighter weight. Maybe that's the difference people are perceiving, rather than color fringing or whatever?
It's simply a different setting for stem thickening, the subpixel AA modes added a lot. It would definitely be possible to set the same stem thickening for grayscale rendering, and on hi-res monitors it would look pretty similar.
>My pet theory is that macOS is going to pull in a bunch of iOS code and iOS has never had subpixel AA.
Some Apple engineer said on reddit that it's because subpixel AA is not so useful in Retinas and HiDPI, but slows down processing and complicates pipelines.
So it's part of the move to Metal and increasing graphics performance, even if it means external lo-res monitors will suffer.
“Monitors will suffer” is a metonym, there’s no need to correct it, it was already correct. Metonymy is common in casual speech but less so in formal writing.
Thank you for the link, it is very interesting. Having read the Wikipedia article, I think that metonym here is a bit too heavyweight for the simple thing expressed in the comment.
Edit: personally I value simple and precise language. Constructs such as those mentioned in the Wikipedia article may convey similar meaning but the fact that they exist means that they allow for some variation in meaning and color which is unnecessary in this case.
You value precise and simple language, but other people value other things like clarity and brevity. It’s a tradeoff. Making something precise can mean adding extra words which sometimes, paradoxically makes it less clear and more difficult to understand. Even in extremely formal contexts like mathematical papers, it's inappropriate to be completely precise because it gets in the way of communicating ideas. And if we strongly preferred simple language, we would use https://simple.wikipedia.org/ instead of https://en.wikipedia.org/
The original statement is clear from context, since the literal meaning is semantically impossible (monitors are incapable of suffering).
>Thank you for the link, it is very interesting. Having read the Wikipedia article, I think that metonym here is a bit too heavyweight for the simple thing expressed in the comment.
Metonym is just a linguistic term. Such terms are not constrained to describe high uses of language by great masters of writing. They are merely names for specific constructs or linguistic phenomena.
A drunken sailor swearing at someone at 3am could be using a metonym just as easily as Wallace Stevens.
> but slows down processing and complicates pipelines.
Rendering in monochrome is also faster than true 32-bit color, but we use 32-bit color because it provides a better experience to the user who is the ultimate consumer of the graphics pipeline.
I actually use Nocturne pretty frequently to turn my screen monochrome if I am doing stuff outside of iTerm or my text editor — I find the use of color unmotivated and distracting in most programs, and especially websites
Here, here for Nocturne! I use it at night, switching to monochrome red night mode, and brightness down to the last setting. Sometimes in the morning I forget and think the screen isn't working.
I just downloaded Nocturne and it's not working for me on High Sierra. Is the most recent version really from 2009? May I ask what system you're using?
Those with older external monitors might take issue with that.
I could replace my old monitors, but they still work well with good colour and brightness, so it's not exactly environmentally considerate, or even slightly necessary.
Adding colour has added very little to UX aside from true-colour icons, the UX itself is essentially the same. Colour is used as a theme on top of a UI perfectly recognisable, and much the same as, mono and 4 colour interfaces of the 80s and 90s.
>Rendering in monochrome is also faster than true 32-bit color, but we use 32-bit color because it provides a better experience to the user who is the ultimate consumer of the graphics pipeline.
It's almost as of it's a trade-off and monochrome so laughingly doesn't cut it, that it's a totally contrived counter example. Almost.
Screen rotation is also a thing on desktop. My Dell has three external monitors, side by side, all rotated in portrait; use a decent window manager and you can have a decent 3×2 grid of windows that easily leads to Perfect Window Placement™ just by using Move Window to Top (Bottom) Half. Gnome and pals know how to handle both horizontal and vertical RGB subpixel arrangements and automatically switches configuration as you rotate the screen.
Mobiles and tablets have such high resolution monitors nowadays they probably run without subpixel AA at all…
I'm confused. Are the screenshots somehow different so that the retina and non-retina screenshots will appear different even when viewing both on non-retina (or retina) display?
I can see a difference between pairs of each screen shot. I'm pretty confident though that I won't be able to tell when I don't have these nice comparison images, or care about the difference in practice.
Yeah, I put them both at normal zoom level and realized that they're both the same, except the retina is much higher pixel density so the text looks a lot bigger when it is set at 1x zoom.
It depends on your hardware. If your RGB are in a different spatial order from the originator it actually makes it worse.
Consider the 3 and 4th images, the "on light" AA and non-AA versions… Look at line number 10, the "let arr1 =…" line. Look at the vertical stroke of the "l" of "let". In the anti aliased version there is a red glow on the left side and a blue-green glow on the right when you zoom in. On the non anti-aliased one there is not such glow. Now lets lay that into pixels on a scanline…
RGBRGBR_________GBRGBRGB subpixel AA
RGBRGB_________RGBRGBRGB non-subpixel AA
So both are just a black gap in an interwise solid line of GBRGBRG dots (I'm hiding the 'rgb' deliberately there, it doesn't exist in the real world on the LCDs where AA works)
If we turn that back into what the computer abstracts as pixels we get…
RGB RGB R__ ___ ___ _GB RGB RGB subpixel AA (see R and GB? halos)
RGB RGB ___ ___ ___ RGB RGB RGB non-subpixel AA
On 150dpi desktop displays it doesn't matter, your eyes aren't good enough. On displays which can be rotated it is a bad idea because the sub pixel AA hack only works in one orientation and that is just confusing.
On my desktop display I see a difference in the light screens. It's a very subtle difference, but enough that it might theoretically irritate me if I had to stare at text all day. Probably not in practice, it's not a massive problem or anything; but yeah, AA looks better.
Where I notice it the most is on the curly quotes and parentheses. Without AA they look... harsh I guess? Or maybe blocky. You notice the vertical lines making up the curves more. You also lose some of the definition around letters - for example without AA the dot on the "i" is much less noticeable.
On the dark theme it doesn't look nearly as bad, I have a really hard time seeing the difference there at all. Maybe that's because they're scaled differently? Or maybe dark themes just don't need it as much?
I’m noticing this misunderstanding quite a bit in the thread. None of those images have antialiasing disabled. What’s been disabled is subpixel antialiasing. So those images are comparing subpixel antialiasing and greyscale antialiasing.
Opinions between the two are mixed:
I’m one of the people that hates greyscale antialiasing (I find it makes text look fuzzier) and prefer subpixel antialiasing (which does a much better job of preserving the intended shape of the font glyphs).
On the other side, there are people who hate subpixel antialiasing (because they can see the colour fringes on the glyphs) and prefer greyscale antialiasing. Here’s an example from 1897235235 lower down in the thread:
“This is actually better for me. I wrote to Steve Jobs a long time ago and asked him if he could switch to gray-scale font smoothing because the tricks they use with colours don't actually work with people like me who are red green colour blind. The end result was that text on apple products looked terrible to me and I couldn't use any of their products until the retina displays came out. In windows, you can use grayscale font smoothing easily.
Anyway, he replied "we don't have any plans to do this" or something like that. Turns out I won in the end.”
Now if antialiasing was actually fully disabled, the difference would be extremely obvious, to say the least.
I wonder if this is part of the reason why I can't really tell the difference in the dark mode pictures, at least without zooming in all the way. I guess the colors from subpixel antialiasing would be less noticable when overlayed or transitioning from dark to light rather than from light to dark?
> the tricks they use with colours don't actually work with people like me who are red green colour blind.
Oh crud, this never occurred to me. It doesn't seem to matter how many times I remind myself that red/green doesn't work for everyone, I still find myself forgetting about it all the time.
Am misreading this thread, or was this one person's complaint on reddit about beta software (with a single commenter saying they've seen the same behavior)?
Are there any more cases, or could this be a bug? Cause it seems like a bug to me.
485 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 353 ms ] threadThe stats I've seen are that most Mac users, as of this year, are on @2x displays.
I have a Retina MacBook Pro I mostly use it plugged into a 27” Dell 1440p monitor.
Every office I’ve worked in that provided Macs also provided a 1x monitor of some kind. Never 4k or 5k.
It's the same reason that video game developers shouldn't be allowed to have powerful GPUs. They need to be testing how the game looks (and works) for most people, not for a group of people only slightly larger than themselves.
I don't see this as a problem with 4K screens starting at 260 euros (~ US$ 306).
You can get the best of both with a 5K-6K screen, but that's currently a very expensive price point not on most people's radar.
The rest are too large to run 2x
And those monitors have too low of a ppi to run scaled
There are quite a few users who prefer the wider format screens for a variety of reasons.
I get my devs whatever they want for hardware, within reason. $500 or $1000 monitors? No questions asked. The price of hardware that will last years is nothing compared to the value of engineer happiness and productivity, especially when compares to how costly good engineers are in the USA and Canada.
Sure if the title has a huge AMD or nvidia logo when it starts, it's going to use a lot of specific functionality from that card, whatever those shops pay them specifically to advertise for. But devs need to ensure titles at least look okay and run at at least 60fps to get the largest sales audience.
(Attempts to disable it tended to get various results in various operating systems, but rarely consistently disabled it)
[1] https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/110750/how-do-i-di...
[2] https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/768bd013-c...
No AA makes sense for DPI greater than about 300, but for anything less, with visible pixels, which is probably most non-4K monitors, I would bet most people prefer AA on. In general, people always prefer AA for 3D and all sorts of other rendering, at lower DPI.
So, this is a typical Apple decision to abandon anyone who doesn't have the latest device from them.
And those who bought a Macbook Air from an Apple Store yesterday.
As for what i consider a good bitmap font, in Windows MS Sans (the one you could find in Win9x, it was removed in later versions of Windows and aliased with MS Sans Serif which is an outline font), plain Courier and Fixedsys. On Linux i like the console font that you get when booting Debian (not sure what is called) as well as the Terminus fonts. On X11 i like the helv* fonts (usually registered as adobe helvetica - honestly, why is font registration on Xorg such a clusterfuck?) and some of the Fixed fonts (the smaller ones mainly, the larger are a bit too jaggy). On Mac... pretty much all of the original Macintosh fonts. I also like the "WarpSans" font that OS/2 (and eComStation) has, it is very compact and i like compact fonts (although i'm not fan of a few details, like the w being a bit too jaggy).
That's probably Unifont: http://unifoundry.com/unifont.html
The exact font used is configurable but Debian uses Unifont by default.
There is no font smoothing at all (the jagged fonts), and then there is grayscale font smoothing, and then there is coloured font smoothing. Apple is switching from coloured to gray-scale, which like OP, is great for me personally as I can see all the colours in the other approach.
I can't help but think this is just another in a long line of paper cuts endured by professional users causing them to switch to a Windows machine.
This is the same change/downgrade that occurs if you go to System Preferences-->General-->Use LCD Font Smoothing When Available.
I did this and the fonts on my 5K iMac display looked horrible. Just atrocious. My plan is to not upgrade to Mojave, and then within a year or so sell all my Apple gear and move back to Linux.
I don't understand Apple's thinking, but I believe a lot of people will do the same.
Apple is removing sub-pixel anti-aliasing for all devices, not just non-Retina ones.
Here's a possibly better comparison, because it annoyed me that the windows weren't aligned: http://www.framecompare.com/image-compare/screenshotcomparis...
Zoomed in on my 10" iPad Pro the main thing I notice is kerning differences.
No they won’t. People don’t notice this stuff. I pointed out the weird font smoothing issue in Finder to my best mate – a professional photographer – and even then she barely had any idea what I was on about.
http://www.technologyasnature.com/screenshot-comparison
The normal UI's fonts are also worse -- about the same as the browser screenshots. Fonts are indistinct and blurry, and very light. All the result of greyscale aliasing only, I presume.
I'd be more outraged if Windows removed cleartype, because their subpixel font antialising actually works and is configurable.
BTW, I did install Mojave beta and the fonts look just terrible even on a Retina display. Shockingly bad. I can't believe Apple is doing this. I just bought a new 5K iMac a few months ago. I wish it were still in the return period...but in other news, I am now selling all of my Apple equipment as it's pointless to have it. Without the great fonts I purchased it for, it's so much junk to me.
And on top of usually not using RGB stripes, they also often use software keystone correction, which means that you don't know the native pixel grid anyway.
So there's no disadvantage for projectors, not at all.
They managed to ship 10.13 with bugs like this that made it into the Ars Technica review: http://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/Sep-23...
PDFs looks very blurry and dirty since High Sierra (Mojave too). In Preview.app and in Safari. You can compare it if open PDF in Chrome (looks sharp in chrome). https://imgur.com/a/TRpk1Oi
fonts on some websites looks blurry https://imgur.com/a/o450Mlr
If that is true and the blurred text is going to be the new normal, I do not see how any professional user looking at type all day long can stay on their platform.
Wow.
Anyone who uses Apple's FCPX or Logic knows we'll have to update to Mojave because eventually we'll try to open the latest version of said software and be told "You must be running Mojave to open this"
I'd really ditch Apple because of stunts like this, but I really love Logic and FCPX so I'm stuck with it.
The idea that they would downgrade the display support so that non-retina monitors--- and let's be serious, that is nearly all monitors that people dock into at work or at home-- are going to look worse in Mojave, is almost too absurd to be true.
I want to see this for myself.
Does anyone know if you can simulate this now, without installing the beta? Or if you can install or somehow use the beta without nuking what you already have?
Edit: I am still on Sierra, because the buzz around High Sierra made it sounds like it was a bad idea to upgrade. This is sounding more and more like Mojave is a no-go as well.
It also makes Retina-class devices look far worse. The fonts on my 5K iMac became much less readable after this change.
I just compared on High Sierra and it's mostly that without subpixel AA types look thinner
I actually prefer this setting to be off on Retina screens. You don't need to anti-alias fonts on a 230ppi display.
That said, if there's anyone in the position to exploit their knowledge of the ACTUAL physical display and its sub-pixel layout, it's Apple. I'd expect Windows or Android to drop sub-pixel AA... but iOS/macOS? I'm mystified.
On Windows there used to be a wizard where you had to choose which one looks better to let the system figure out your display’s subpixel arrangement.
I’ve never used Windows beyond 7.
And 1080p projectors in conference rooms.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/font-smooth
To really appreciate the difference, I recommend turning on screen zoom with ctrl-scroll in the accessibility system prefs. You’ll see the effect of SPAA as colouring on the left and right edges of text.
Final Cut X was ... something else. Anyone who claims you just need to get use to is must not like having good tools. It's a terrible video editor and Apple killed off their only pro video tool.
Around that time I just ran Linux in a VM on my Mac and got into tiling window managers. I tried a bunch and liked a lot of the, but eventually settled on i3 (which I still use today). I ran OpenSUSE at work. Someone at work was throwing out an old IBM dual Xeon and that became my primary box and I used my MacBook as a Windows gaming laptop, up until it was stolen:
https://khanism.org/faith/fate-and-destiny/
At my most recent job, I asked for a PC laptop (Dell or HP) and they gave me a terrible MacBook. I run Gentoo on it:
https://penguindreams.org/blog/linux-on-a-macbook-pro-14-3/
but I still hate the hardware and it's more difficult to get Linux on a MacBook than any other x86 laptop I've owned, including two Dells, an HP and an MSI.
I don't want Apple to go away because we do need competition in the market, but their operating system and hardware seriously needs to stop being a pile or poop.
The only reason why anyone continues to hate it today is because they're used to the terrible, horrible and stupid way that all the other NLEs work (including FCP6). It can be disconcerting to use FCPX because everything seems like a fancier version of iMovie, that it therefore must be not for "pros" or it's missing lots of "pro" features.
But it's not. Terrible, horrible and stupid NLE design isn't a feature. FCPX is the first one to get it right, but the rusted on Premiere / Avid "professionals" refuse to see it.
Yes, I'm running the beta right now. If you're scared about your data, create a new partition or virtual machine and install macOS to that.
Someone at Apple really seems to believe in pain as a motivator. And it may work in the short term, but in the long term, it always drives customers to other platforms.
The actual reason is that switching to hardware-accelerated font compositing means that you lose out on subpixel antialiasing, because of complications related to blending. The classic way of doing subpixel text rendering means you need three distinct alpha channels, and most hardware only lets you supply just one. There are ways of hacking around this with dual-source blending, but such a feature was not supported at the time of Vista. In Windows 8 and up, DirectWrite can now support hardware-accelerated subpixel AA, and the OS does so by default.
But what was this crazy obsession with hardware-acceleration of every rendered character and its grandmother? While you're busy Flippin' 3D I get it, you can temporarily render aliased Wingdings if that makes your life easier, but at least for Pete's sake I just want to enjoy not tearing my eyes out the other 99.99999% of the time. If there was anything slow or poorly implemented in XP it honestly wasn't the taskbar font rendering.
(Not angry at you; just annoyed at the situation they caused.)
> DirectWrite can now support hardware-accelerated subpixel AA, and the OS does so by default.
No, it (still) doesn't. This is my taskbar: https://i.imgur.com/zzIusQD.png
Market context: Microsoft yearned to implement the Metro UI they'd been researching for a long time (Zune was its public appearance) — and Vista kind of soured people on Aero by osmosis; third-party Android applications always had consistency issues, so Google wanted to mandate something that would be generic enough to work (and be easily implemented) for all apps but also look distinctly specific to Android; Apple wanted to signal some shift to upscale high fashion (parallel to "everything is black glossy glass and aluminum" in its industrial design) and understood fashion-minded upscale as a mix of modernist typography with neon bright contemporary color schemes.
To make up for the boring visual aesthetic that often resulted, they recommended adding animations throughout apps. Most of these animations aren't very helpful, but they keep the user distracted for a moment.
http://sluglibrary.com/
What? ClearType was basically introduced in Vista and refined in Win 7.
Win 8 is when they start to remove it for various applications (UWP, and some others) due to its poor performance on retatable devices (tablets mainly).
I think they simply believe they're large enough player to make such calls unilaterally, and that the rest of the industry will follow. And I fear they might be right - such decisions enter into the calculations of more "commoditized" vendors like peripheral manufacturers when they design next iterations of their products.
I mean, that's why removing the headphone jack is such a big deal even for people not using iPhones. Not just because we sympathize with iPhone owners - but because Apple is big enough to make this stupidity a new standard everywhere.
Apple isn’t quite big enough to force an industry change in personal computers.
PC’s have been slowly adopting it. Give it a couple of more years.
If the end result is that you can't tell if plugging into your friend's charger is going to blow up your phone (or video game console), I think USB-C is going to fall apart.
The problem with the USB-C standard is that USB-A now transcends far beyond the personal computer industry. It's now a power adapter standard for mobile phones and all sorts of gizmos, gadgets and accessories for the home and car. USB-A isn't going anywhere for a long time.
I don't think that's true. USB became ubiquitous because literally every PC included it after 1998. Yes, it might have helped that USB also worked with Macs, unlike previous connectors.
In many cases it's arguable whether Apple forced a change or it was a case of Apple "skating where the puck is going" and doing something that was inevitably going to happen given time.
Similarly, if Tesla never existed the electric car would still have been an inevitability. Perhaps it would have taken another decade to emerge. Perhaps two decades. But it would have eventually. On electric propulsion, Tesla is most definitely just "skating where the puck is going."
In both cases—Tesla and Apple—they're not just skating where the puck is going, they're also in control of the puck, even if only a little bit.
[0] And thinking about it further, I shouldn't have conceded the assumption that USB's dominance was inevitable. It seems that way in hindsight but was it really? It could have fizzled like Firewire. It is entirely possible that new incremental standards—perhaps an ultra-fast nine pin serial port protocol—could have filled the gap before another connector emerged to dominate.
Often these technologies are stuck until there is a first big adopter. Now Google, Apple Macs, and most of Android is behind USB-C for instance, there will be a lot more accessories that use it. Right now IMHO it is being held back mostly by cost - micro-usb and an A to micro-B cable are still the cheapest parts.
I'm of course not including the apps I use less often but really like when I need them, like Lightroom, Photoshop, Illustrator, Keynote, Excel/Numbers, OmniGraffle, Sketch, and Things.
I think Linux is safe from me, except as the system I have next to my daily driver, and which I use for Windows (when I need to look at something there) and dual boot for Tensorflow.
For office I use WPS office (word/excel/power point). It has tabs for documents and I have never had document compatibility issues (like I have had with libre office). I believe office 2013 runs under Wine too if you really need office.
I prefer the web clients for email anyway.
I use wavebox to integrate web based chat and email with the operating system for notifications.
Safari uses WebKit so it's very similar to the engine chrome uses - but Google forked at some point.
Deepin Terminal is an amazing terminal.
Can't help you with Xcode unless you switch programming languages :)
It would be great if Adobe released Linux versions of their products.
I don't do much video editing but I think there are good options on Linux.
Try it as a challenge I think you might be pleasantly surprised - if you use all the above apps how far Linux has come. Most of these apps work on Mac as well so you may find a few new good tools.
Safari - either Google Chrome or Chromium (depending on how open you like things) can keep pace with Safari in terms of general usability and extension ecosystem. At worst I think you'd find the experience on par, but when I owned a Mac, I found Google Chrome to be more performant than Safari on the regular, and its Linux build is just as quick. A lot of Linux folks recommend Firefox as well but I still am not convinced it beats Chrome in terms of out-of-the-box magical "Just Works" factor.
Discord - The client may be alpha, but this works just fine honestly. I've never had a problem. This is largely because the desktop app is Electron based, so it's running on a web browser anyway; it's very, very cross platform friendly. Slack too, if that's your thing.
iTerm - There are MANY good terminal clients for Linux. I personally use Terminator, which I find has a good balance of power features and stability. I particularly enjoy its terminal broadcasting implementation, but I'm in the unusual position of working on many parallel servers in tandem during my day job, so this feature is very important to me.
iTunes - If it's just for movie watching, I've found VLC to be perfectly servicable. mPlayer is also quite popular and there are many frontends.
Messages, Outlook - Here you've got a fair point. Outlook in particular is a pain point; there are workarounds to get it working in Thunderbird and Evolution, but they're just that - workarounds. Anything beyond basic email will need the web app; fortunately the web app isn't _terrible_, but yeah. Fair complaint.
Xcode - If your goal is to build Mac / iOS apps, there is no substitute thanks to Apple's EULA. For everything else, pick your poison; there are more code editors and IDEs on Linux than one can count, many of them excellent. Personally I'm happy with Sublime Text (paid, worth every penny) and a Terminator window, but I hear VSCode is also excellent, which is odd considering that's a Microsoft endeavor. (Now if we could just get them to port Outlook...)
Google Chrome's extension ecosystem is undoubtably far, far ahead of what Safari has. As for usability, and…
> I found Google Chrome to be more performant than Safari on the regular
People use Safari because it integrates so well with macOS, is performant, and doesn't kill resources (CPU, RAM, battery, you name it). No other browser comes close, even on other platforms. Apple's just spent too much time here optimizing their browser that nobody else can match it (maybe Edge on Windows?).
> There are MANY good terminal clients for Linux.
iTerm just has everything and the kitchen sink. Like, it has some flaws, but it just does so many things that I haven't seen any other emulator do. Plus the author is really smart (he's at the top of the comments currently, if you want to check his stuff out)
> Xcode
Xcode can be surprisingly nice for C/C++ development, when it decides it wants to work.
Check back with Konsole.
I don't think I know all features, but just the things I know it does, because I use them:
- Tabs, obviously. Movable between windows, too.
- Arbitrary in-window splitting (tiling)
- Monitors
- Broadcasting
- Signals
- Profiles, obviously.
- Copy stuff as HTML & export whole scrollback as HTML and also print it / convert to PDF
- Can basically configure everything
Edge feels like poor man's Safari. However the rest of Mac OS (in terms of GUI, not underlying OS) feels like poor man's Windows. :D
Even IE will at least provide a free VM image these days.
That depends on the environment. I assume you're talking about Outlook as a frontend for an enterprise Exchange setup?
If your mail server admin configures IMAP and SMTP correctly, it's a breeze to get it set up (you will need SSL though). Use "DOMAIN\user.name" as username together with your AD password (and for team/shared mailboxes, use DOMAIN\user.name\mailbox.name, where mailbox.name is the cn or sAMAccountName attribute of the mailbox AD entry). Thunderbird can handle everyday emailing as well as responding to calendar events that way; I'm not sure about integrating "real" calendar stuff. Auto-completion of mail addresses must be done separately in Thunderbird, you'll need the AD structure information (root DN, plus the DN of your AD account so you can log in).
What you'll miss is forwarding rules access, but that can be done via webmail if the need arises.
Discord works perfectly fine in a web browser. IIRC the platform-specific clients are just running a web browser themselves. Would rather use PWA then.
As for iTerm, you don't need that when you use i3 but perhaps you can specify the features you need.
1Password, I recommend Bitwarden. Cheaper, open source, you can even run an open source backend.
Messages, no idea why you want that. I only use WhatsApp for IM, and even that is just a web app.
For development I recommend Sublime Text. You can use it for free, though I did buy it (as someone else commented; worth every penny).
Skype for Linux is actually fallen behind to the other ports. Though I don't use Skype I heard complaints about that.
I do a ton of things in the browser, love the availability of a good Terminal at my fingertips (same as macOS), develop webapps and love the simple availability of a full local web server stack to develop on and so on. I use LibreOffice for my very few "Office" needs. I use Firefox as my primary browser (moved away from Chrome to Firefox before I made the switch to Linux). I use Visual Studio Code as my primary editor. I use Krita for my very few photo editing needs - simple stuff really like cropping or color picking. That's about it. Everything else happens in the Browser or on the command line.
As Netrunner is a derivative of Manjaro and thus Arch it's very simple to access a plethora of packages from their AUR system. It's like Brew on steroids.
Have been really happy with the switch!
Another sign that a lot of innovation comes from China currently... The Matebook Pro X looks great also.
Seriously, there's nothing that comes close to Windows - it just works great and the manufacturer doesn't pull the rug out from under your feet every 5 years like Apple does. If there were something better I'd switch to that too, but there's not.
I'm sure glad that my ancestors decided to move out of their caves.
I love my magsafe charge + 2 thunder + 2 USB + HDMI ports and can't imagine life with fewer.
People complaining about their Macs type posts constantly top HN. Usually the comments are filled with further moaning about how things have been so bad for so long with Apple etc., usually accompanied by threats of moving to another platform.
In particular, with OS X I never need to worry about video drivers, switching dGPU on/off, etc. just to use my laptop in typical ways.
Retina screens are great. Disabling the better font-rendering tech is stupid.
And doubling the resolution doesn't make subpixel AA obsolete either.
The main reason is that when I have to move somewhere, it is only one thing to remove (and then add back in) compared to the 5 minute shuffle I used to do.
There have only been one or two situations in a year where it caused a slight annoyance.
Legacy is technical debt. You have to move on eventually; for many, the pain is worth doing it early.
I'm not a huge fan of Apple, but they've been pulling this stuff for ages, and it doesn't look like people are going anywhere.
Interestingly, it drove me to buy three maxed-out 11" MBAs before they were discontinued.
So I have not left the Apple computer platform but I won't be buying another laptop until I burn through these three - which could be as late as 2022-2023 ...
As for fonts/aliasing - I just won't upgrade past Sierra (or whatever ... I use Mavericks now ...)
http://www.framecompare.com/image-compare/screenshotcomparis...
You can test this yourself in the browser. For instance, toggle subpixel AA using the CSS -webkit-font-smoothing property in Safari. There is a clear visible difference that you can screenshot. On some websites with a light-on-dark theme, disabling subpixel AA with CSS was an important part of improving visual consistency between browsers. It’s also important to explicitly control when working with animations that changes text scale or rotation.
It’s easier to see with an enlarged screenshot, but you can totally see the difference at 1x.
I agree that they work for technical comparisons of rendered output.
If the display you're viewing the image on has a different subpixel layout than the one that the image was rendered for, it won't look sharper.
Which isn't a perfect comparison because of image compression, but at least on my retina MB they look identical to me.
EDIT: You can also see the side-by-side at 28:03 in this video https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2018/209
On my MacBook Air, the Mojave capture looks blockier.
I won't update (I'm still on Sierra, actually, I ususally wait one year before updating anyways).
http://www.framecompare.com/image-compare/screenshotcomparis...
If you read through the comments, you'll find this link buried, which shows a developer showcasing the difference in the new AA. Basically font-smoothing is grayscale-only in Mojave.
* https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2018/209/?time=1...
If I take a screenshot of some text and zoom in, I can see the colours, just like in the video. If I zoom back to normal size and change the saturation to zero (only greyscale) I cannot see a change in sharpness of the text on my 2009 macbook pro.
This is actually better for me. I wrote to Steve Jobs a long time ago and asked him if he could switch to gray-scale font smoothing because the tricks they use with colours don't actually work with people like me who are red green colour blind. The end result was that text on apple products looked terrible to me and I couldn't use any of their products until the retina displays came out. In windows, you can use grayscale font smoothing easily.
Anyway, he replied "we don't have any plans to do this" or something like that. Turns out I won in the end.
Well, he’s dead and you’re alive.
But the reason I’m sad is that this wonderful hack was short lived: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1vfBq6vg409Zky-IQ7ne-Yy7o...
My pet theory is that macOS is going to pull in a bunch of iOS code and iOS has never had subpixel AA.
That's PR-speak. Translation "It works acceptably well for all pixel layouts, and it is easier for us to implement".
> I released a build of iTerm2 last year that accidentally disabled subpixel AA and everyone flipped out. People definitely notice.
On a Retina display at least I find that the most striking difference is that most text appears to have a lighter weight. Maybe that's the difference people are perceiving, rather than color fringing or whatever?
Some Apple engineer said on reddit that it's because subpixel AA is not so useful in Retinas and HiDPI, but slows down processing and complicates pipelines.
So it's part of the move to Metal and increasing graphics performance, even if it means external lo-res monitors will suffer.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metonymy
Edit: personally I value simple and precise language. Constructs such as those mentioned in the Wikipedia article may convey similar meaning but the fact that they exist means that they allow for some variation in meaning and color which is unnecessary in this case.
The original statement is clear from context, since the literal meaning is semantically impossible (monitors are incapable of suffering).
Metonym is just a linguistic term. Such terms are not constrained to describe high uses of language by great masters of writing. They are merely names for specific constructs or linguistic phenomena.
A drunken sailor swearing at someone at 3am could be using a metonym just as easily as Wallace Stevens.
Rendering in monochrome is also faster than true 32-bit color, but we use 32-bit color because it provides a better experience to the user who is the ultimate consumer of the graphics pipeline.
I could replace my old monitors, but they still work well with good colour and brightness, so it's not exactly environmentally considerate, or even slightly necessary.
Adding colour has added very little to UX aside from true-colour icons, the UX itself is essentially the same. Colour is used as a theme on top of a UI perfectly recognisable, and much the same as, mono and 4 colour interfaces of the 80s and 90s.
A current dense desktop monitor seems to be around 160ppi, so 8-bit grayscale would be around 280ppi, which is starting to approach a low-end printer.
It's almost as of it's a trade-off and monochrome so laughingly doesn't cut it, that it's a totally contrived counter example. Almost.
Mobiles and tablets have such high resolution monitors nowadays they probably run without subpixel AA at all…
For anyone who wants to see whats coming when Mojave gets released without subpixel AA, I made a few comparison screenshots on a non-Retina display:
iTerm2 dark subpixel AA enabled: https://static.imeos.com/images/iTerm2-3.1.7.png
iTerm2 dark subpixel AA disabled: https://static.imeos.com/images/iTerm2-3_1_20170924-nightly....
iTerm2 light subpixel AA enabled: https://static.imeos.com/images/iTerm2-3.1.7-light.png
iTerm2 light subpixel AA disabled: https://static.imeos.com/images/iTerm2-3_1_20170924-nightly-...
On Retina screens, I don't see much of a difference:
iTerm2 light subpixel AA enabled on Retina display: https://static.imeos.com/images/iTerm2-3.1.7-light-retina.pn...
iTerm2 light subpixel AA disabled on Retina display: https://static.imeos.com/images/iTerm2-3_1_20170924-nightly-...
Consider the 3 and 4th images, the "on light" AA and non-AA versions… Look at line number 10, the "let arr1 =…" line. Look at the vertical stroke of the "l" of "let". In the anti aliased version there is a red glow on the left side and a blue-green glow on the right when you zoom in. On the non anti-aliased one there is not such glow. Now lets lay that into pixels on a scanline…
So both are just a black gap in an interwise solid line of GBRGBRG dots (I'm hiding the 'rgb' deliberately there, it doesn't exist in the real world on the LCDs where AA works)If we turn that back into what the computer abstracts as pixels we get…
On 150dpi desktop displays it doesn't matter, your eyes aren't good enough. On displays which can be rotated it is a bad idea because the sub pixel AA hack only works in one orientation and that is just confusing.Where I notice it the most is on the curly quotes and parentheses. Without AA they look... harsh I guess? Or maybe blocky. You notice the vertical lines making up the curves more. You also lose some of the definition around letters - for example without AA the dot on the "i" is much less noticeable.
On the dark theme it doesn't look nearly as bad, I have a really hard time seeing the difference there at all. Maybe that's because they're scaled differently? Or maybe dark themes just don't need it as much?
I’m noticing this misunderstanding quite a bit in the thread. None of those images have antialiasing disabled. What’s been disabled is subpixel antialiasing. So those images are comparing subpixel antialiasing and greyscale antialiasing.
Opinions between the two are mixed:
I’m one of the people that hates greyscale antialiasing (I find it makes text look fuzzier) and prefer subpixel antialiasing (which does a much better job of preserving the intended shape of the font glyphs).
On the other side, there are people who hate subpixel antialiasing (because they can see the colour fringes on the glyphs) and prefer greyscale antialiasing. Here’s an example from 1897235235 lower down in the thread:
“This is actually better for me. I wrote to Steve Jobs a long time ago and asked him if he could switch to gray-scale font smoothing because the tricks they use with colours don't actually work with people like me who are red green colour blind. The end result was that text on apple products looked terrible to me and I couldn't use any of their products until the retina displays came out. In windows, you can use grayscale font smoothing easily.
Anyway, he replied "we don't have any plans to do this" or something like that. Turns out I won in the end.”
Now if antialiasing was actually fully disabled, the difference would be extremely obvious, to say the least.
I wonder if this is part of the reason why I can't really tell the difference in the dark mode pictures, at least without zooming in all the way. I guess the colors from subpixel antialiasing would be less noticable when overlayed or transitioning from dark to light rather than from light to dark?
> the tricks they use with colours don't actually work with people like me who are red green colour blind.
Oh crud, this never occurred to me. It doesn't seem to matter how many times I remind myself that red/green doesn't work for everyone, I still find myself forgetting about it all the time.
Are there any more cases, or could this be a bug? Cause it seems like a bug to me.
https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2018/209/?time=1...