Upgrade woes

[René J.V. Bertin]

On Saturday August 26 2017 10:02:27 Peter Humphrey wrote:

>Yes! The default font in KDE Plasma is Noto. If I leave my folder list in 
>Noto it occupies more than one screen, vertically; and my message list is 
>needlessly big, obtrusive and wasteful. I've tried living with it, but I 
>soon reverted to my preferred Deja Vu, which is much more economical and 
>still perfectly legible.

Good to know I'm not the only one who thinks this.

Deja Vu is a bit of a mix between Lucida Sans and Arial, right?
I use Segoe UI in semibold, 11pt for the default system font but 9pt in the message list and 8.5pt in the folder list. Segoe UI may be a MS product but is actually a very good font for UIs. Using semibold means regular text is more solid at small pt sizes while it's still possible to select bold typeface.
(note that I do build my own Qt with a small patch to improve its support for less common font weights, and that I have freetype+fontconfig with the Infinality-Ultimate patches)

So yes, I could do without an explicit way to select a dedicated font, but I think it'd actually be more work to implement and maintain an interface where you can control size, weight, type and colour of a predefined font (family) rather than an interface where you call up the font selector dialog.
The former requires multiple widgets and calls to apply the selected attributes while the latter can be just a button with a single setFont call.

>I'd hate to lose this bit of control over my system. It's a major reason for 
>disliking Gnome.

I don't particularly dislike Gnome, it just doesn't provide certain options I won't do without.

>There seems to be a general drive these days towards wasting acres of screen 
>space, to no useful effect; also towards removing visual clues to, for 

Exactly. Hard to say if iOS or Android started it. Things were indeed going a bit too far in the metaphor direction, but what we're seeing now is too much of a knee-jerk opposite reaction.
People should start reading Edward Tufte's books again, I think. Even those who spend their day developing UIs on their multi$$$ crazy-high-res screens.

FWIW, in terms of being useful and unobtrusive, Qt's Fusion style actually works quite well.

>If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

Amen to that!

The nice thing with KDE (and Qt in general) is that anyone who gets bored with a given style can just pick another, so app developers can leave the "it's time for a fresh new look" aside. But never forget that desktop-wide configuration can only cater to common denominators, at least in an implementation where each interface element doesn't have its own set of configuration resources (anyone remember xrdb and ~/.Xdefaults?). 

R.