Linux still has horrible font rendering, which makes web browsing uncomfortable. It doesn't come close to Windows or Mac. Fonts often appear soapy, kerning is off etc.
Fonts on my main Linux "workstation" may not be as perfect as on the M1 Mac I use from the couch but it's because my 38" monitor ain't retina and it's a far cry from making "browsing uncomfortable".
Yes, many of the CSS stacks (even for the big sites which really should know better) are totally broken when it comes to Linux (they don't list enough fonts that various distro will have by default, they list fonts that many distro will not have by default and unsurprisingly end up defaulting to shitty fonts) and as soon as one site started using that one CSS stack, they all started the copy/pasta. But I wouldn't go as far as saying that browsing on Linux is "uncomfortable": many people do that on a daily basis and are perfectly happy.
Also not all websites have broken CSS font stacks for Linux. Some saw the light.
Yes.
> my 38" monitor ain't retina … perfectly happy
Put another way, either you are not visually discerning or your bar is lower.
// Since “FHD” laptops, and monitors <4K, are still a thing, you are not alone.
You're all shifting the goalpost.
Nobody is saying that fonts on a retina display on OS X do not look better than fonts on a non-retina display on Linux.
What we're disputing is that fonts rendering on Linux is so bad that it's "uncomfortable".
Now we may have a discussion as to whether everybody should be using retina display or not but that'd be another topic.
I do not expect a non-retina display to display fonts as beautifully as a retina display, just to make things clear.
What I'm saying is that fonts under Linux aren't bad to the point of being uncomfortable.
And just to make it clear: I've got Windows and Linux, on non-retina displays, showing the same sites. Linux ain't worse.
There's a big difference between saying: "Retina displays are better than non retina ones" and saying: "Linux font sucks".
Yup: not everyone is on 4K / retina display. We know that. It doesn't make font rendering on Linux broken.
But I suspect you bringing it up, and me responding to it, doesn’t make either position more authoritative. And given “I’ve written more books than I can count” it could be your discernment of numbers or bar for objectively counting things is lower. ;-)
About retina vs. non retina, I’d argue font rendering algos matter more the less resolution they’re working with, so are even more important on non-retina displays. I’d further argue MacOS regressed on this by killing off sub-pixel rendering in Mojave, effectively dropping support for non-retina.
On low quality displays, Windows and Linux could/should look better than MacOS. When they don’t, they’re “doing it wrong”.
(In particular, I get color banding and inconsistent weights in Windows, especially with thin fonts.)
I can also have gorgeous font rendering. I would mess around with some live distros to see what you prefer.
This is how my comment looks to me (on linux): https://i.imgur.com/wvruFyX.png
If you look at those screenshots on a 4K display they're incredibly blurry because all you're looking at is your browser doing image scaling optimized for photographs.
I guess font rendering is very subjective.
And if you're looking at those other screenshots on a 4K display then you need to also zoom to 50% and get your eyes close the the display, otherwise you're just seeing the results of an image scaling algorithm, which will indeed look terrible.
Here is Fedora/KDE/Flatpak/Firefox with default settings at 4K resolution and 100% browser zoom for comparison:
https://i.imgur.com/s3ynhuj.png
Also with my preferred browser zoom: https://i.imgur.com/9PXDbxY.png
For the above images you'll need to zoom 50% on a 4K display, because PNG image files do not carry pixel density metadata. If you have 1080p display then you have to keep 100% zoom and sit far away instead.
edit: your second screenshot looks very sharp and nice on my display.
See: https://johankj.github.io/devicePixelRatio/
If you see more than 1 at 100% zoom you have resolution scaling. Try browser zooming to 50% or 200%.
I look at the original commenters screenshot at 50% browser scaling but it's still blurry. I guess there is an element of image compression there.
On the other hand; from my own experience (I own linux, macos and windows pcs) on the same display Macos text rendering is much more sharper and pleasant to look at.
I mean with fractional scaling where 1 < devicePixelRation < 2 you're doing it wrong and everything will look bad anyway, so I just assumed integer scaling. And 4K @100% is unusable anyway.
But more to the point you can't easily display those screenshots with different fractional scaling without pixel grid misalignment.
> On the other hand; from my own experience (I own linux, macos and windows pcs) on the same display Macos text rendering is much more sharper and pleasant to look at.
On hires displays (devicePixelRatio >= 2) you're probably just comparing default fonts. And on lowres display (devicePixelRatio = 1) OSX is much much worse than Windows's Cleartype, it's not even a contest.
Linux was always able to be as good as Windows on lowres displays, just was held back by patents, so the Freetype defaults used to suck, and you had to configure it yourself for the full effect.
Idk if it's any better nowadays, 4K display are so cheap and ubiquitous that I really don't get why anyone would buy anything else, except I guess gamers. But with all those AI scaling technologies (FSR 2.0 etc.) hopefully 1440p is on the way out.
That depends on the physical display size and viewing distance.
If you need more working space there's always 5K. That's 1440p@2x. You can even DIY one for pretty cheap. I know there's at least one 3:2 4K display on the market as well, though I wish there was a 24" version.
That's a distinction that doesn't have to exist. If you don't insist on maximizing all windows, a single large monitor gives you more flexibility that multiple monitors with the same total screen area. E.g. for many applications 1080p is too wide to be effectively be used by a single window but too narrow to have two windows side by side. Dividing a 4K or screen by 3 is much better and also allows you to freely choose the window sizes. Some basic tiling support in your WM (either automatic or via shortcuts) is recommended ofc.
I use a 38" 3840x1600 monitor (= about 110 DPI) at 100% scaling and it works just fine for me at normal sitting distance. That's the same horizontal resolution as 4K and I don't think the missing 560 pixel rows would make much difference to how I would use it.
Apple's "retina 4K" LG Ultrafine 4K Display is actually 4096x2304 at this size, which is much higher density at 218.58 PPI.
This is as good as macOS' rendering as I've ever seen on any other machine, and I'm really fastidious about my fonts. It's really easy to achieve:
1. Install Fedora
2. In GNOME Tweaks, disable font hinting. Looks good only on HiDPI screens, this is why it's not default. If you're not on Fedora, change all fonts to Noto because they're much higher quality.
3. Optional: copy the Windows and macOS fonts to avoid the crappy "lookalike" replacements. The screenshot above uses Verdana straight from a Windows 10 installation, which is exactly what's requested by HN's stylesheet.
What's your distro?
Fontconfig is working fine but Verdana is a Microsoft font and Geneva is a Apple font.
My font fallback for sans-serif is DejaVu Serif.
You're right about trying different distros. Manjaro+Gnome does much better IMO: https://i.imgur.com/kiLDWzJ.png
Perhaps there's a component of how the LCD is presenting it involved? to me my font is extremely uniform and sharp with no bleeding or blurring.
What tweaks do you have? I used to run X11 and ran the gamut of x11 based font rendering tweaks (example of how my old machine looked: https://i.imgur.com/J9biJsW.png )
But with sway/wayland I have much less ability to change things.
Additionally, for ages Linux had shipped with Full hinting, which means distorting the font so straight lines are always on integer pixel boundaries, which looks atrocious. These days distros like Fedora use Light hinting, which is a little better, and in my opinion No hinting looks best, which is what macOS does, but on a low DPI screen means having blurry font. So on low DPI screens you have the choice between distorted but clean fonts, or undistorted blurry fonts.
I don't know about sway, in my case I'm using Fedora with 2x scaling, so I have the option of disabling hinting and avoiding distortion.
What's interesting is the MBP handles external displays horribly with the current version of OS X. Lid closure is a crap shoot on what the device decides to do.