I hate mobile. Because Microsoft is only concentrating on mobile, it means I can never use Windows again.
The fonts are so atrociously terrible in Windows 10 there aren’t even words for it. They are like a volcano erupting right into your eye, like watching any Ray Romano “comedy,” like a kissing a cactus with your whole face.
And I found out the reason. It’s because Microsoft now only allows grayscale anti-aliasing even in their fucking desktop OS. This color-based anti-aliasing (aka ClearType) didn’t work correctly on tablets and phones due to the fact that color-based anti-aliasing depends on one pixel orientation, and tablets and phones can be rotated. So instead of just leaving it in for the desktop OS — the vast majority of their users — they ripped it out and returned their OS to 1983.
So in other words for their very small share of the phone and tablet market, they decided that the monitors of ~1 billion desktop users should be like reading hieroglyphics off a damn rock.
I read all the time, all day long. So fonts are pretty important to me. I can’t accept bad ones. And Windows 10 renders fonts worse than my old Windows 3.11 installation from back in 1993.
Al hail progress.
How many people are even using Windows Phones though?
It’s my impression that people are either using Android phones or I-phones or they’re sticking to pre-smart phone phones like flip phones or Blackberries ( I haven’t seen one in a while tbh). I literally don’t know anyone with a smart phone that uses a Windows phone.
Of course I need to get out more so YMMV. Even at the level of a pretty toy nobody is preferring Windows.
If anything readability is even more important on a smart phone or a tablet because even the biggest phones are much tinier than an average display. I’m constantly zooming in on things so I can read them on a smartphone. I don’t do this on laptops or desktops.
So does this mean you’re sticking with Mac or Linux? I’ve seen some of your old posts, so I’m not sure when you’ve ever liked Windows, tbh.
The Windows phone marketshare is about 2% I think.
On a tablet or smartphone, the (wrong) idea is that the high resolution makes up for the lack of proper anti-aliasing, but I have a high-DPI screen and Windows 10 still looks terrible even at 5K. So I think they just don’t care about the desktop any longer.
On a regular monitor that most people still use, Windows 10’s fonts will look just atrocious since regular-DPI monitors depended so much on this color-based anti-aliasing.
On a normal DPI monitor back in 2010, I actually preferred Windows 7 as no monitor at the time had enough resolution to display fonts all that well and since Microsoft respected the pixel grid, the fonts looked better than on the Mac, where they then looked blurry. Mac “properly” rendered the fonts but they looked incredibly blurry and soft because the displays at the time just weren’t good enough to do that and thus elements of the font protruded outside the grid.
That’s all reversed with the advent of the high-DPI (retina) display. And due to Microsoft’s actions in destroying their desktop OS deliberately like this.
I preferred Windows 7 at the time of its release. Prior to that, I used and ran Linux for 7 or 8 years as my main desktop OS, but when Windows 7 came out pretty much switched to that until about 2014, then have been on Mac since early 2015.
Guess I’m not going back to either Linux nor Windows in the foreseeable future since neither one properly supports high-DPI displays and Mac OS does so beautifully and with no issues of any kind.
In Windows and Linux, it’s all issues all the time and no one seems to want to fix them. Windows is actually making it worse since Windows 8 worked better at high-DPI than Windows 10.