Windows gamers and reviewers seemed to not realize AMD cpu performance was nerfed on Windows until the latest gen AMD release. From time to time there have also been issues with Windows scheduling for Intel cpus. Including a competing OS in comparisons allows reviewers to sanity check stuff like that. Wendell had the most balanced reviews because he was presenting cross platform and productivity along with Windows gaming performance. When Microsoft held a monopoly that sort of reviewing wasn’t possible. You had no idea if Windows was nerfing particular platforms or why.

Overall Linux gaming might be worse or some titles really bad but lets get it out in the open. It will be good for all consumers because it will drive improvement.

I am pro-nuclear power but also a realist. We have a small population, limited capital and a skills shortage in this area. We can’t move as fast or as cheap as countries with existing nuclear capabilities. We are facing a global problem and it makes more sense for us to export nuclear fuel to countries that can increase nuclear capacity much more cost effectively than try and build our own. Same reason we sell iron ore and import cars. The coalition didn’t want to continue to subsidize foreign companies manufacturing vehicles in Australia. To be competitive in the global economy you have to play to your strengths.

We had to bring in Argentinian expertise to build our research reactor. If there was multi party support for increased nuclear R&D towards a small scale power generation plant and it wasn’t to be at the expense of renewable investment or throw a lifeline to coal and gas then I would be in.

The coalition is serious about nuclear as a political strategy, not as a solution for climate change. They want to cut renewable investment and extend and even increase coal and gas consumption for the benefit of their mates. They hope to win back voters concerned the coalition isn’t concerned about climate change (eg Teals) with a decisive strategy and want to paint the other parties as not serious about climate change because they won’t consider nuclear.

Everyone concerned about the current situation has been forced to consider nuclear. The killer is the economics. Everyone who has looked into it knows the problems and the massive opportunity costs that would result. Massive state intervention forcing nuclear power on consumers, investors and taxpayers who don’t want to pay for it goes against the principles of the Liberal Party and shows how much of a sellout Dutton and co have become.

It the tragedy of the commons. It is inevitable. Anything good is always ruined by the bad behavior of a few.

It isn’t too bad currently compared to other platforms due to the low traffic. There are many richer targets for manipulators and crazies where they can reach a wider audience.

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You might as well start calling 20 year olds boomers because it is a class war and always has been a class war and always will be a class war and age is irrelevant. Any name that obscures that fact only helps perpetuate the divisions. Ageists are in the same category as racists, sexists and all other bigots. They contribute nothing to debate but name calling. Deal with the hate or direct it where it is deserved. Call these health insurance CEOs what they are. They are parasitic hoarders of wealth who profit from the misery of others. In fair societies we provide healthcare for all, young and old without these scum. Only a society that has its shit together can do something like that and you can’t get your shit together if all you do is call people names.

I shouldn’t still need to point this out but most boomers are poor. They also have a lot of medical issues and are mistreated by the health system and aged care. They are also mentally abused by cynical political strategists that target their fears and drive them half crazy.

If you haven’t noticed the wealth divide is increasing and the rich are getting further away from regular people. That is happening despite rich boomers dying. Their wealth is being inherited and their replacements are just as mean.

Anytime you see a divisive comment like old.people, immigrants, trans are at fault question the source and if it is worth repeating. Its possible a lot of such comments originate in enemies of free societies. Community is important. It’s the foundation for a fair and peaceful society. We can’t have community while we have this mindset of excluding the other.

It is a political strategy. It isn’t intended to solve our problems or the worlds problems. It solves problems for the coalition (getting the teal vote) and the fossil fuel industry (increases life of their assets by diverting investment and attention from more competitive alternatives). People will vote for it based on the feels and their echo chamber. It isn’t supposed to make hard headed intellectual sense. It is supposed to win votes and it probably will.

It won’t make a difference. All the experts said Malcolm Turnbull’s NBN MTM bullshit didn’t make sense either and journos were suppressed for factual reporting. Over a decade later I still am stuck on decaying copper with no upgrade in sight. Takes hours to upload any content and everything dies with a Steam update. Safe Liberal seat, never any consequences. Its all about tribalism, identity politics, and biased media influence. Nobody gives a rats about facts.

Current nuclear policy is a calculated dual pronged attack sourced from the fossil fuel lobby. It isn’t genius but then neither are voters.

It is supposed to wedge the climate change vote. Many environmentalists have historically been anti-nuclear technology and that stance makes no sense given the scale of the climate change threat. This presents a responsible adult alternative to the impractical tree huggers. You can save the environment and vote for a party owned by fossil fuel interests. Heaps will fall for it. It is solid emotionally. Unfortunately the economics are complete bullshit because it would be fantastic if nuclear was a real option here.

It also serves to delay alternatives. It directs investment and government support away from renewables which are increasingly just a bit too competitive with stranded fossil fuel assets. You can say you are combating climate change by referring nuclear to committee and planning that takes decades by which time you have retired to your advisory position with a fossil fuel company.

Very transparent, manipulative politics playing the electorate for fools but it will probably work.

Digital licence is all I have used for about 7 years. Police here are careful never to reach for a phone as they can’t legally. You display the licence and give it a shake to animate it and they copy the number down in their notebook. If the police ever did illegally take a phone I would wipe it and replace it and lodge a complaint.

They may have similar protections in Europe. People often post opinions on social media without checking facts. I get why on commercial social media where everything is rage bait. But i don’t know why people can’t take a few minutes to check local laws before posting here.

Not sure if the legislation is good or bad. Time will tell.

Two things are clear though. The large social media platforms are worth billions of dollars and can afford to self regulate. Also they extensively profile users to sell data and targeted advertising and serve targeted content that will keep people engaged (addicted).

I don’t know if they really need age verification when they know all your friends, interests and shopping habits. Their algorithms know you are an Australian teenager as that knowledge is their product.

Hopefully the fediverse and non profit sites don’t get caught up in this. Unfortunately our politicians have very low technical literacy.

Massive difference in education/qualification between average police and nurses. You need a high school certificate to become a cop and at minimum a diploma for enrolled nurse or an undergraduate degree to start on a career as an RN and with specialization the skies the limit. All that time and expense studying while a police officer can be earning good money.

Pay for nurses and to some extent teachers has a basis in historical sexism. Even as these occupations became increasingly professional and demanded much higher levels of education they retained the stigma of being womens jobs. Its a joke and completely without justification.

We keep it out of habit and because the Government bribes us.

Some people probably get good value out of it but not us. There is a lot of faith healing stuff on their policies and those practitioners rely a lot on over-servicing for their income so the people into that shit likely make claims. Partner went into hospital once and I said why didn’t you use the card to get a room upgrade with nicer wallpaper and its basically not worth the effort. I’m not complaining because if they were offering value it would be at the expense of the public system and peoples health. They overcharge for policies that are basically useless and never get claims but as long as they can lobby politicians it keeps them in business anyway. They should let people add their pets to the family policy, then we might find some use for it.

There is no simple answer. Its is almost entirely dependent on implementation. All systems are vulnerable to things like supply chain attacks. We put a lot of trust in phone vendors, telcos and Google.

If you are going to compare to something like termux you need to compare with an equivalent sandboxed environment on regular linux, like a docker/podman container with appropriate permissions. As far as I know they use the same linux kernel features like cgroups and namespaces under the hood.

Traditionally Linux desktop apps run with the full permissions of the user and the X window system lets apps spy on each other which is less secure than Android sandboxing by design. There have been attempts to do better (eg flatpak/flatseal, wayland) but they are optional.

Having comprehensive unicode language coverage on a free OS is amazing. I wish the font system was smart enough to hide Noto variants in creative apps but leave them available for browsers. There is a workaround to do that but its a huge pain. I wouldn’t delete any files managed by the package system. They will just keep coming back anyway. There are smaller collections of noto fonts in AUR that will satisfy the noto-fonts dependency which should keep KDE Plasma happy. They should be a straight swap if you are comfortable with an AUR dependency for a functioning desktop. The newer one is noto-fonts-main updated this year or there is an older noto-fonts-lite. Not tried either. Usual stuff about backups and taking advice from strangers on the internet.

Segoe might benefit more from the embedded bitmap or autohint settings than the regular open source fonts I am likely to use. Microsoft would optimise the hell out of it to take advantage of their proprietary, patented font rendering system. I wouldn’t be surprised if it rendered poorly with distro defaults. Its the kind of blind spot a lot of open source devs and packagers could easily have. Its probably packed full of embedded bitmaps for small sizes and proprietary hinting stuff that linux won’t understand.

I don’t doubt you. Linux font rendering has been good enough for so long now that its surprising when people say its worse than some other system but I think it is still a reasonably common complaint so there has to be something to it. A lot of distros probably don’t have a very good font selection installed out of the box compared with proprietary systems and I am sure that plays a role.

My desktop has a 38" ultrawide and the pixel density is a lot lower than your dual 4k monitors so I want to do everything I can for font rendering and your post has got me asking questions. I am in the process of configuring a minimal, low distraction tiling wm setup for a bit of fun (also another nvim conf spring clean). I hadn’t considered changing the font rendering defaults.

I think I have all the fonts you list installed except for Hack. Inter is also a good one for UI. I don’t use Fira Code anymore for code/terminal but I keep it around. It is a nice code font with ligature support but it didn’t have an Italic variant and I like subtle use of italics in code and docs. Currently using Iosevka for mono but next week it might be something different.

This post is fascinating. Most distros have good defaults for font rendering now and I haven’t used hacks like infinality to fix font rendering on Linux for years. That project doesn’t even exist anymore. I would be really interested to know which setting made the difference for OP and why.

I am writing this on a little HiDPI laptop with over 200dpi and to be honest hinting and sub-pixel rendering are invisible to my eyes on this device. Apple dropped sub-pixel rendering ages ago when all their products moved to retina displays. But its still really useful on low dpi displays and I thought it generally worked well enough out of the box.

A file almost identical to the local.conf has been posted to forums in the past but back then fontconfig often shipped with outdated defaults. My distro defaults have aliasing, slight hinting and sub-pixel rgb enabled out of the box.

Arch has these defaults. Bookworm lacks the sub-pixel-rgb (its just a link away) but my guess is Ubuntu derivatives probably include it:

• 10-hinting-slight.conf
• 10-sub-pixel-rgb.conf
• 10-yes-antialias.conf
• 11-lcdfilter-default.conf

The differences I see are the last 3 options in local.conf:

• disabling embedded bitmaps. I think this would change rendering for old MS Office fonts. And perhaps break some emoji fonts. I have Noto Color Emoji but I don’t have any old MS fonts. This seems like it would have limited impact.
• enabling autohinting. If you have slight hinting enabled and the font contains hinting information it should automatically use it. So I thought it made no difference if you have good fonts installed. I might be wrong. But again if you use good fonts I am not sure this has an impact.
• setting font weight to medium. This is an odd one. Does this mean that every font query returns a medium weight or that if you don’t give a weight you get medium? Fattening up thin fonts might be a user preference but you can also select desired font weights in your desktop settings and apps.

Fontconfig is a compiled database for font queries, it doesn’t do rendering. Whatever you put in fontconfig, an app like kitty will not implement sub-pixel rgba rendering for performance and implementation reasons but many other terminals will. I think gtk4 might be heading the same way. Depending on variations in colour vision and displays people tend to disagree on the value of sub-pixel rgb but it looks like it is a common distro default anyway.

The local.conf file should work on any distro. It’s an opinionated override and might not be ideal for everyone but you can use the settings as a starting point to research further. Don’t modify the other files in /etc/fonts as they will be updated by the distro. Claude’s other suggestions apart from selecting some better fonts generally do nothing as far as I can tell. I connected to one of my debian machines and the symbolic links Claude gave to /etc/conf.avail are a debianism as I suspected. If you don’t install or use bitmap fonts and you override the rgb aliasing in local.conf I don’t see the point of either of those symbolic links but whatever meatbag wrote them in a stackoverflow or reddit post intended them for a debian distro.

Freetype2, fontconfig and cairo are going to be pulled in as dependencies when you install just about any desktop app/library eg firefox, gtk so this is a no-op. Same for installing the jre and fontconfig again. Its pointless. The freetype2.sh line is commented out because that has been the default setting for the last 8 years so it makes no difference. The gfx.webrender.all setting in firefox is an override to force something it is most likely already doing based on the detected environment. If you check about:support the chances are you are already using hardware rendering. And its a performance and not quality setting. Half of this makes no sense.

Installing nicer fonts is always a good idea and also setting your desktop and application default fonts.

Some of the local.conf settings could potentially makes a big difference if your desktop environment defaults/user settings aren’t good. Don’t know a huge amount about freetype settings but I suspect using assign in there might override desktop environment settings which some people might not want. I set mine in a gui like the monkey I am.

My conversation with any llm tends to go, “you got a, b, c wrong, it should be d, e and f” and it says “sorry, ofcourse it should be d, e and f, my mistake, here it is with d, e, f, g and h”. Then I say “g and h are wrong it should be i and j”. And it keeps going. In the end I write it myself. Huge time wasters.

Edit: didn’t pick up on it immediately but the two symbolic link commands are suss (they are for debian based distros). Endeavor is arch based and fontconfig on arch has the configs in /usr/share/fontconfig and the ones in the conf.default directory should already be linked into /etc/fonts/conf.d. 10-sub-pixel-rgb is in /usr/share/fontconfig/conf.default so that is already linked for me so attempting to do another link without deleting it would be an error - another no-op. I don’t like rgb sub-pixel rendering so its overridden in my desktop settings. It shouldn’t be necessary on high dpi IMO. The proper path for 70-no-bitmaps is in the /usr/share/fontconfig/conf.avail directory if you want to link it properly. If you use the wrong path as Claude suggested, its another no-op. If, like me, you don’t have any bitmap fonts installed it won’t make any difference anyway. Also /etc/fonts/conf.d is created by the fontconfig package so that is another no-op.

Edit 2: The setting’s name might be inaccurate but Cleartype is the name of Microsoft’s proprietary font renderer and isn’t available on Linux. So possibly gfx.font_rendering.cleartype_params.rendering_mode was picked up from some StackOverflow discussion about Firefox font rendering on Windows. I won’t say it doesn’t work without reading the Firefox source code and/or trying it but I suspect a setting with that name would not have any effect on Mac or Linux.

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Other countries have villages being firebombed and families being slaughtered. I am not uncaring but disenfranchised American’s are way at the back of the queue. The only political parties that are going to preference US political refugees over genuine humanitarian refugees are going to have exactly the sort of bigoted attitudes you are seeking to avoid. Fix your own mess people. Get on a bus, travel to a red state and actually talk to people. You keep bashing them over the head about them being stupid bigots but then you refuse to engage with them. That clearly isn’t working.