Anti-Aliasing broken in Leap 15.0 after Upgrade from Leap 42.3, Text appears dimmed.

English Applications
#1

Everything looked fine in leap 42.3 with anti-aliasing switched on. Text was sharp, bright, and not pixelated.

After upgrading (with the DVD) and then doing a full web update to make sure I was current, I’m stuck with broken anti-aliasing which seems to dim the text greatly. Dark text on a light background is minimally affected, but white text on a dark background is very distorted from being dimmed at various points in the characters - that is the antialiasing is making curves or edges very dim so the text is hard to read. It also makes red text on a white background less visible because then the text appears to get lightened.

I played with the subpixel method (RGB, etc.) and hinting, and nothing fixes the dimming problem. Only thing that solves it is to completely turn off anti-aliasing, but then of course I get pixelated text.

What changed to break this? It was working great.

#2

In what context does this problem manifest? Gnome? KDE? XFCE? LXQt? IceWM? Mate? Vttys? Something else? All the above? What is output from:

inxi -Gxxb

You may not have inxi installed, so do

sudo zypper in inxi

first if this is your case.

#3

I see it with the KDE desktop icon fonts and also emacs. So I assume it affects all applications, subject to font and background color.


System:    Host: skywalker Kernel: 4.12.14-lp150.12.58-default x86_64 bits: 64 gcc: 7.3.1
           Desktop: KDE Plasma 5.12.8 (Qt 5.9.4) dm: sddm,sddm Distro: openSUSE Leap 15.0
Machine:   Device: vmware System: VMware product: VMware Virtual Platform serial: N/A
           Mobo: Intel model: 440BX Desktop Reference Platform serial: N/A BIOS: Phoenix v: 6.00 date: 05/19/2017
           Chassis: No Enclosure type: 1 serial: N/A
CPU(s):    4 Single core Intel Core i5-8600Ks (-SMP-) arch: Skylake rev.10 speed: 3600 MHz (max)
Graphics:  Card: VMware SVGA II Adapter bus-ID: 00:0f.0 chip-ID: 15ad:0405
           Display Server: x11 (X.Org 1.19.6 ) drivers: vmware (unloaded: modesetting,fbdev,vesa)
           Resolution: 1764x1020@60.00hz
           OpenGL: renderer: SVGA3D; build version: 3.3 Mesa 18.0.2 (compat-v: 3.0) Direct Render: Yes
Drives:    HDD Total Size: 161.1GB (66.2% used)
Info:      Processes: 194 Uptime: 8:53 Memory: 3303.9/16003.1MB
           Init: systemd v: 234 runlevel: 5 default: runlevel5.target Gcc sys: 7.3.1
           Client: Shell (bash 4.4.231 running in konsole) inxi: 2.3.40