In my previous ruminations on ditching the heavy DEs, I did not anticipate one factor which matters quite a bit to me: The DEs tend to manage fonts better than the X server alone.
I realize GNOME, for example, does not manage fonts for all applications. Notoriously, Firefox using the GKT2 interface does not respond to GNOME font tweaking. You have to manage Firefox fonts by mucking around in fonts.conf and so forth. Fine, but when you run, say a Java application, GNOME takes care of that. Without GNOME, Java fonts look as bad as they always did before GTK2. So it is with several other toolkits.
In the past, I noted Windows did fonts better than Linux, but those days are long gone. On my current hardware, no incantation of Windows can match what I get with Linux or BSD for font clarity. When I apply myself to working out what makes for a good display, Linux offers opportunities; Windows does not. Cleartype is almost a waste of time. Fonts matter to me more than graphics, so this looms large in my world.
When I tested running IceWM, with and without GDM, the fonts were too often disappointing. I don’t mind how X rendering operations show me TTFs in varying scales versus the kerning consistency of GNOME and KDE. I can adjust to that. It’s the lack of sharpness across the board. Given my long experience fussing around with this for the past 20 years or so with Linux and other OSes, I admit I don’t understand what difference it makes to run GNOME and KDE versus non-DE interfaces, but it seems to me X.org is simply passing the buck on issues which should have been fixed in X. Font rendering management itself belongs logically with the underlying display server, and only tweakable in the DE.
At any rate, my exploration has shown itself a lost cause. I don’t really like the current situation, but I realized long ago my interests were out on the fringe in many ways.
