Backwards compatibility in Windows is insanely good. And it has to be! They cannot afford to (intentionally) break things! Microsoft is a huge company, so they can do that.
On the other hand: There’s just a bunch of people doing font stuff on Linux. Really, it’s just very, very few people who really know what they’re doing. Let’s be generous and say it’s 10 people.
Now that we have Unicode and color emojis and High-DPI screens and what not, those 10 people have to get their priorities straight. Dealing with fonts is hard enough as it is, but those modern requirements are basically insane. You *need* a large company to get this right. Here’s an example: They dropped support for some older font formats last year. This would never have happened on Windows. But the font guys on Linux didn’t have a choice. Support for those formats made their code more complex – and just few people still use those formats. Well, not really, a lot actually, but there are converters, so you can take your old format and convert it to a new one. (This conversion process is the root cause of my current issue.)
Linux works well-ish on a desktop, but there’s a serious lack of manpower in some areas. Fonts is one of them.
The proper solution for me would be to get involved, report the issue, track it down, maybe provide a patch. Sad thing is, I cannot do that anymore. At least not for something as complex as fonts. I’m pretty much burnt out already and I have zero motivation to sift through this madness.
Backwards compatibility in Windows is insanely good. And it has to be! They cannot afford to (intentionally) break things! Microsoft is a huge company, so they can do that.
On the other hand: There’s just a bunch of people doing font stuff on Linux. Really, it’s just very, very few people who really know what they’re doing. Let’s be generous and say it’s 10 people.
Now that we have Unicode and color emojis and High-DPI screens and what not, those 10 people have to get their priorities straight. Dealing with fonts is hard enough as it is, but those modern requirements are basically insane. You *need* a large company to get this right. Here’s an example: They dropped support for some older font formats last year. This would never have happened on Windows. But the font guys on Linux didn’t have a choice. Support for those formats made their code more complex – and just few people still use those formats. Well, not really, a lot actually, but there are converters, so you can take your old format and convert it to a new one. (This conversion process is the root cause of my current issue.)
Linux works well-ish on a desktop, but there’s a serious lack of manpower in some areas. Fonts is one of them.
The proper solution for me would be to get involved, report the issue, track it down, maybe provide a patch. Sad thing is, I cannot do that anymore. At least not for something as complex as fonts. I’m pretty much burnt out already and I have zero motivation to sift through this madness.
Backwards compatibility in Windows is insanely good. And it has to be! They cannot afford to (intentionally) break things! Microsoft is a huge company, so they can do that.
On the other hand: There’s just a bunch of people doing font stuff on Linux. Really, it’s just very, very few people who really know what they’re doing. Let’s be generous and say it’s 10 people.
Now that we have Unicode and color emojis and High-DPI screens and what not, those 10 people have to get their priorities straight. Dealing with fonts is hard enough as it is, but those modern requirements are basically insane. You *need* a large company to get this right. Here’s an example: They dropped support for some older font formats last year. This would never have happened on Windows. But the font guys on Linux didn’t have a choice. Support for those formats made their code more complex – and just few people still use those formats. Well, not really, a lot actually, but there are converters, so you can take your old format and convert it to a new one. (This conversion process is the root cause of my current issue.)
Linux works well-ish on a desktop, but there’s a serious lack of manpower in some areas. Fonts is one of them.
The proper solution for me would be to get involved, report the issue, track it down, maybe provide a patch. Sad thing is, I cannot do that anymore. At least not for something as complex as fonts. I’m pretty much burnt out already and I have zero motivation to sift through this madness.