Yeah, maybe. I do not have a very high DPI monitor and TBH i find even my 27" 1440p monitor to be too high DPI for my taste, i just couldn't find something smaller with the other specs i wanted (VA for having decent blacks and with a high refresh rate). I'll probably replace it with a ~23" 1080p monitor at some point though if i find a VA with high refresh rate... and not be curved (because for some reason 99% of them are curved). Either way i'll stick with the non-antialiased fonts :-P.
Well I would find 27" 1440p too high DPI too if I ran it at 100% scaling :) I run my 24" 4K at 200% scaling so it's effectively 1080p. Just super crisp which I like.
We have super-crisp screens on our phones these days, why not on the computer?
There are too many micro-issues with high DPI and TBH while the text is sharper i do not see the benefit for everything else while they do add additional strain on the CPU and the GPU (especially for games), so i just avoid it.
Some time ago I tried 150% scaling on my laptop (which has a 1080p monitor at a small size) and i just reverted to 100% because a lot of things, from websites to applications, etc didn't work properly. Note that this was on Windows but i do not expect things to be better in other OSes anyway (except perhaps macOS but it has a ton of other much worse drawbacks IMO).
Perhaps if all i used was terminal apps and pure text editors i'd have a different opinion but i use a lot of GUI apps with images, games, etc.
I don't know, but seems like you're bending over backwards to explain that CDE's weaker rendering is a good thing. Maybe it suits you, but I think it's a clear fact that the reason it's weaker is because they haven't developed it, not because they were able to but made a conscious decision not to.
If CDE could render better but let you opt out that'd be great... but it can't render more accurately in the first place. It's not choosing to be worse.
> seems like you're bending over backwards to explain that CDE's weaker rendering is a good thing
You'd be wrong.
What i write isn't about CDE but about antialiased text. As i wrote a few parent posts above i even have antialiased text disabled on Windows 10 via a registry setting and Windows can certainly do antialiased text rendering.
> If CDE could render better but let you opt out that'd be great... but it can't render more accurately in the first place. It's not choosing to be worse.
CDE can do antialiased text rendering, or more precisely Motif can (CDE doesn't render its own fonts) if configured to do so via Xft which uses FreeType for font rasterization - the same library that other toolkits (e.g. Qt) use. So its font rasterization can be as good as other toolkits. You need to do it via X resources and is opt-in instead of opt-out.
And besides i do not even use CDE myself, last time i used it was years ago out of curiosity. Personally on Linux i prefer Window Maker (which can also optionally use Xft for antialiased text rendering).
My guess is that because beauty is in the eye of the beholder, you seem to make the assumption that "antialiased=good looking, non-antialised=bad looking" but in my comments for this entire thread i claim that i prefer non-antialiased text. And i'm going to guess that anyone who would use CDE would also like it to use non-antialiased text.
Anyway, here are a couple of screenshots in the CDE wiki that says how to enable it[0]. Unsurprisingly the only comment there is about someone saying that they prefer the non-antialiased version.
Apparently there are a issues with the terminal emulator though i guess xterm would be a better choice anyway.
The pixels in that screenshot are absolutely enormous. Modern screens have far higher resolutions. If you can’t even see that then I don’t what what else to say.
Sorry but what you write make zero sense, the pixel size has nothing to do with screen resolution and the pixel sizes are not even something you can judge from a screenshot. And even ignoring all that, the topic was about text antialiasing, pixel sizes (whatever you may mean with that) and resolutions have absolutely zero to do with it.
It depends which OS and desktop you use of course. Mac does it perfectly. Windows still has many issues (sadly). Gnome is pretty great at it, KDE too but there are some minor issues (the mouse pointer doesn't scale and has to be manually enlarged). Still, I use KDE this way and it's fine for me. Every version brings improvements too.
Overall I still think it's worth it. But YMMV of course!
On my 4K 24" turning anti-aliasing off makes it look less crisp though because the letters don't look just right.