I'm sorry the conversation tone is changing, I didn't do this intentionally. But there are few things that logically don't connect for me here.
Supporting FS using the macOS algorithm doesn't affect 1:1 rendering at all. You can enable subpixel AA when rendering at non-fractional scale, and you can disable it when you do fractional scale.
Windows 10 already does this per control i.e. when you render a control in RGBA it disables subpixel AA, otherwise it supports it. In this case what I propose is vastly simpler: do it per desktop, or even per X server instance.
It's literally an afternoon project, and let people pick their settings.
Anyway none of this matters, because Linux on the desktop doesn't matter either (yet). And with that attitude honestly it'll never matter.
As a last note, you can do subpixel AA with the macOS algorithm. It'll be more performance intensive as it'll be a custom shader to scale this way, but it's mathematically 100% doable. I just don't think it's worth the bother.
What I am trying to tell you is that 1:1 font rendering on macOS is simply not very good. This caused Apple to be the ass of jokes for a while. If you think that 1:1 rendering of common kanji is good, well, we’ll just have to agree to disagree. As for downsampling for fractional scale... I was only ever trying to demonstrate that it is not ideal, and not everyone wants it. I still (as I had said early in the thread) find it to be an acceptable tradeoff.
And yeah, UI toolkits could switch off hinting and subpixel AA at 2x. I acknowledge that this would be logical anyways, since subpixel AA is not very useful at 2x.
But honestly, as far as Apple typography goes, it’s all beside the point. This was in a thread where I was initially trying to demonstrate that doing it in Linux is hard for historical reasons. I believe I made that point. As for will it ever be done? Well, like I said, it has been done. Wayland supports what you are describing and more just fine, right now, and it works very well. (Full disclosure that most programs will actually just use fractional scale, but you can also round up to the next integral and the compositor will downsample as you would hope.) The actual hard problem is getting Wayland working for everyone, on their hardware and with their software. Progress is being made every year, but it’s been a long road. Until then, I just think it would make more sense for Elementary OS to work on more tractable problems with the Linux desktop.
Supporting FS using the macOS algorithm doesn't affect 1:1 rendering at all. You can enable subpixel AA when rendering at non-fractional scale, and you can disable it when you do fractional scale.
Windows 10 already does this per control i.e. when you render a control in RGBA it disables subpixel AA, otherwise it supports it. In this case what I propose is vastly simpler: do it per desktop, or even per X server instance.
It's literally an afternoon project, and let people pick their settings.
Anyway none of this matters, because Linux on the desktop doesn't matter either (yet). And with that attitude honestly it'll never matter.
As a last note, you can do subpixel AA with the macOS algorithm. It'll be more performance intensive as it'll be a custom shader to scale this way, but it's mathematically 100% doable. I just don't think it's worth the bother.