Hi all, did something change in either Plasma or the KDE Frameworks regarding font rendering, specifically in non-KDE programs ?
I’m running Fedora 42, KDE Edition and while doing the upgrade from Plasma 6.5.2 to 6.5.3 I noticed some fonts now look different in Zen (Firefox fork I use as my main browser) as well as Thunderbird.
It seems like they only have grayscale hinting while KDE apps benefit from RGB hinting? All fonts appear “thin” as a result, while KDE programs seem unaffected.
Attached below is a screenshot from three programs: Zen on the top left, Thunderbird on the top right, and System Settings on the bottom. My font settings specify all proportional fonts should be “Inter Display”, installed from a dnf package which has not changed in quite a while.
Also checked with the Nvidia Settings GTK-based app, which suffers from the same font problem: all fonts appear thinner, and more pixelated than they used to. Which leads me to believe either:
- the KDE font settings are not propagated properly, leading to GTK apps using a fallback font ;
- non-KDE programs don’t perform RGB hinting anymore for some reason ;
- something changed in a minor update to Plasma, which I’ve been unable to find.