As a Mac user, whenever I run Linux, I get depressed about how bad the font rendering is. It's getting better, though it sometimes requires installing a special non-free version of Freetype and setting some global config that I can never remember. I always lose track of which distros get it right without requiring any tweaks. However: While the glyph rendering in the article's screenshots looks quite, the kerning is just awful.
For example, here [1], upper left quadrant: "Ap plications", "A ppC enter", "C alendar". Anyone know why it's so bad? Is it a configuration flag?