Comment by WesolyKubeczek
21 hours ago
It doesn't support Unicode, doesn't support font antialiasing, and instead of fontconfig, you need to grapple with X11 core font support, using ttmkfdir and friends, and make the X11 server aware of where the fonts are.
It's some experience I definitely don't miss from those days.
Oh, yes, I remember those early times as well. :) The question is whether it's possible to maintain the legacy API and upgrade the internal architecture to use more modern approaches. I think it's almost always possible, but perhaps the cost to develop and maintain such a legacy layer is too high for an open-source desktop environment and toolkit. The Windows OS managed to support old APIs quite well, but the available resources are incomparable.
Are you sure no antialiasing? No subpixel for sure.
I think I have some rusty memory of LD_PRELOAD my own .so with AA enabled (special patch? I don’t recall) with a game’s installer I shipped to get the statically linked GTK+1.2 Loki Games setup utility looking modern. That plus a QUITE SPIFFY looking splash bitmap slapped onto it would hopefully let the installation complete before anyone realized it was a creaky old thing.
Oh yes. I present you gtkaa:
https://web.archive.org/web/20231129124306/http://alx14.free...
…and recompile mozilla and nautilus and maybe all other stuff using gtk1…
As someone who used to build Mozilla suite back when their gtk2 support was experimental, I’d say this is too much faff.
GTK 1.x used GDK which was a thin veneer on top of Xlib, and I think it defaulted to use Xlib calls for text rendering.
If the X server supported antialiased text (and subpixel rendering) then GTK should have done too.
Do any X servers do? Antialiased text on X is generally done by rendering the glyphs client side.
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Motif was improved with XFT/Fontconfig support. GTK1 can be patched too'
I wonder how many llm tokens are burned dealing with Unicode issues?