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Comment by dijit | Hacker News Reader

Linux can have crappy font rendering.

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

It looks very bad tbh. This is how my comment looks on Mac for comparison. Uploading to imgur to test if there is compression in play here. https://i.imgur.com/hSirmx6.png

interestingly I much prefer mine. :\

I guess font rendering is very subjective.

Setting aside font selection and looking at rendering, yours is softer around the edges which may subjectively feel pleasant when looking at it as an image but is objectively worse for reading.

https://i.imgur.com/ptUyCn0.png another linux screenshot fwiw

You're either using 200% scaling or browser zoom because I had to scale your image by 50% on a 4K display for it to look 100% sized. This is apples-oranges.

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.

no I'm not using any zoom or extra scaling. It's the native scaling of mbp retina display. Screenshot is ~2 times bigger than what I actually see.

edit: your second screenshot looks very sharp and nice on my display.

Retina display is at least 200% or more scaling, right? You're comparing hires text rendering to lowres. Screenshot is 2x bigger because browser doesn't know about pixel density and scales it 2x by default. It does the same to those low res screenshots so they look normal sized on 4K but they're blurry because they're being image scaled.

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%.

Yes retina display is 2x. But saying a display is 4k doesn't tell anything about its pixel density or scaling.

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.

> Yes retina display is 2x. But saying a display is 4k doesn't tell anything about its pixel density or scaling.

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.

> And 4K @100% is unusable anyway.

That depends on the physical display size and viewing distance.

No, not really. 4K@100% is 4x working space as 1080p. There's no way to put that much information in your field of view all at once. If you scale it up (or get really close) where anything is legible it goes out of your field of view and you can only look at (roughly) 1/3 sized region of the screen at a time. That's not usable as a single display. You're basically emulating multi-monitor 1080p at this point.

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 not usable as a single display. You're basically emulating multi-monitor 1080p at this point.

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.

I use a 23.7" 4K (2160p) @ 200% and I think it's barely enough pixel density (180ppi), so I can't relate to this at all.

Apple's "retina 4K" LG Ultrafine 4K Display is actually 4096x2304 at this size, which is much higher density at 218.58 PPI.

Not bad for me on Fedora 36 Wayland, 2x scaling and no hinting, like God intended.

https://imgur.com/a/ZFTwW6A

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.

Look at the last word, "linux". In both the "n" and "u", the left stem is thin and crisp, but the right stem is thick and blurry. Maybe it doesn't bother you, but I couldn't put up with that if I were using it all day.

You're right about trying different distros. Manjaro+Gnome does much better IMO: https://i.imgur.com/kiLDWzJ.png

That seems pretty terrible to me, even discounting the fact that it's monospace (I use monospace for editing too). Especially notice how the letters have inconsistent thicknesses, sometimes thicker on the left vs the right or vice versa, sometimes even different thicknesses depending on where they appear in the sentence (e.g. look at the 'n')

Hmm not sure if it’s the quality of the image or the font, but that might prove his point, that looks quite bad.

How does it look for you?

Is not subpixel rendering of fonts impossible to illustrate unless you sit down in front of the same monitor (or at least similar hardware)

Yes, doesn't have to be the same monitor but it needs to have the same subpixel orientation and you need to have the same resolution or 2x resolution and scale 50% so it pixel aligns.

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.

It's both. The image compression makes it not perfect, and it's also a monospaced font, which makes it impossible to say anything about the kerning.

I hope the blurriness is because of image compression. Because if it is not, the rendering is really bad here.

Hrm, looks fine to me; this is how windows looks through the same compression: https://i.imgur.com/JRt9aIo.png

Wow, everyone is different I guess. That looks awful to me. I would go mad if I had to use that.

The kerning on your screenshot is very chunky. In particular look at the kerning on the lower case r’s in your screenshot. The r is given way too much horizontal space particularly to it’s right, especially so in the word “crappy”.

I think it’s a monospace font, which makes the keming look bad

Shouln't it be ke r n i ng instead of keming if you are talking about a monospace font.

AH, that's because I'm using a monospace font for editing, normal pages use the normal font: https://i.imgur.com/otqaSTa.png

That looks horrible to me too, perhaps I'm used to windows but the word "comment" sticks out to me there as particularly bad.

It's not even the right font, unless you're using custom CSS. The Hacker News stylesheet calls for "Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif", and your PC renders a serif font instead. Something's wrong with your fontconfig setup.

What's your distro?

I'm using Archlinux and/or Gentoo.

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.

The font fallback for sans-serif should be DejaVu Sans, not Serif. I didn't have any issue last time I used Arch.

That screenshot is not very good at all, and I'm on Linux myself. You're just a few tweaks away from better rendering.

Willing to be wrong of course, I suspect that what I'm seeing and what others are seeing are quite different.

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.

This screenshot looks better than the other of yours, but honestly I think it's more due how how antialiasing is rendered there vs in your Firefox screenshot.

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.

That honestly looks like something from a laptop in 1998. I haven't seen a screen that bad in a very long time.

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