leopold

Huh? How did you narrow it down to just GIMP? Are you excluding all non-GUI software or something? GUI has never been a big focus for GNU (which I assume is what you’re referring to when you say FSF), though they do have a couple of projects like GIMP and GNUCash. Most notably as far as GUI is concerned, they instigated the GNOME project, though they later split off. But yeah, they still maintain extremely important tools, especially for developers and UNIX systems, such as glibc, coreutils, gcc, emacs, gdb, make, bash, grub, octave, guix, etc.

Because it’s not actually a good idea.

You create text that is basically impossible to search. Like, for instance, do a Ctrl+F on this page and search for “Bold”. You’ll see the example from OP doesn’t get picked up, because it’s not a B, it’s a 𝗕. And it’s not an o, it’s an 𝗼. And so on. Or how about this? Go on Google and copy-paste this word from OP: “s̵t̵r̵o̵k̵e̵”. Now, stroke isn’t a particularly unusual word, but this thread is just about the only result Google returns. Because it’s not stroke. It’s s̵t̵r̵o̵k̵e̵.

It’s also bad for accessibility. A lot of the time screen readers just won’t know what to do with your bold or italic Unicode text.

And of course this only works for characters for which Unicode actually has these variants. Not a problem with the Latin alphabet, but what about Arabic? Cyrillic? Chinese? Devanagari? Hangul? Not gonna work.

These characters are from the Mathematical Alphanumeric Symbols code block. They’re stylized Greek and Latin letters meant chiefly for use in mathematical contexts. The Unicode standard explicitly advises against using them to fake markup for the reasons outlined above and more. A simple markup language is just about always going to be preferable to faking it with Unicode.

I set up mine same as I did on desktop. Copied my custom filters over and enabled all of the default ones. Works well enough.

Dunno what you mean. JuK was ported to Qt6 last February alongside the rest of KDE. It’s on Flathub and most distro repositories.

Source? PipeWire was designed to use those APIs. This is the first time I hear about it causing any particular issues or overhead.

The job of the window manager is to manage windows and very little else. Font rendering is done by the widget toolkit, usually via freetype/harfbuzz.

It used to be open source, but large parts of it have been relicensed under their proprietary source-available shared source license. The reason why it isn’t entirely proprietary is that it’s based on Firefox, which is entirely licensed under the MPL. The weak copyleft of the MPL states that all parts lifted from Firefox must remain open source, but the new parts can be proprietary.

Source-available licenses are a type of proprietary license where the code is made public for people to look at, but you’re not actually allowed to use it. Users can still contribute upstream, so they’re usually parasitic licenses aimed at getting free labour out of the userbase without actually giving back any code to the commons, all while keeping up the illusion of being open source. It sucks.

Okular has JavaScript support. I think some things don’t work, but it’s worth a try.

Also, Adobe Reader had a native Linux version, so I wonder why the Snap is using Wine.

LibreOffice uses its own widget toolkit. It works similarly to wxWidgets, basically just maps to whatever toolkit is native on the current platform. It uses Win32 on Windows, Cocoa on macOS, Qt on KDE, GTK on GNOME and a few others.

That said, their current approach to dark themes is pretty bad. It can very easily conflict with the dark theme from the host toolkit and cause issues if misconfigured, which has caused a lot of people to think it just doesn’t work. It does work, but it can be confusing as hell to configure correctly.

For instance, LibreOffice has a setting you can use to change the application colors. It barely works and you should never touch it. Just let it get the colors from your toolkit.

There’s also the fact that LibreOffice doesn’t use FDO icons and has its own icon setting which doesn’t automatically follow dark/light theme. If you’re using a dark theme, you have to manually switch the icon set to one that isn’t impossible to see on a dark background.

Oh and if you want your documents to use a dark palette that’s also a separate setting. Like I said, confusing.

FDO stands for FreeDesktop.Org, the committee responsible for various desktop Linux standards including icon themes. So FDO icons just refers to your system icon theme, which LibreOffice doesn’t use.