Am I the only one who doesn't get what the fuss is about?
I use macOS, I use Linux, I don't have a problem with the fonts. In my opinion they all look great.
I'd say this though, macOS fonts generally look worse and too thick on a 1080p display.
I use macOS, I use Linux, I don't have a problem with the fonts. In my opinion they all look great.
I'd say this though, macOS fonts generally look worse and too thick on a 1080p display.
Looking at the screenshots in the article, I personally prefer the "before" version.
On my Linux machine I use Deja Vu fonts for pretty much anything. I very intentionally don't install "Windows compatibility fonts" and the like. In my opinion it looks great, but someone else might have a different opinion.
I also used the classic "Xterm fixed" fonts for a long time and thought that looked great too (I switched to DejaVu Sans Mono a long time ago, mostly for better scaling) which still has a group of dedicated "fans" today, but many would probably consider it horrendous.
One thing I will say that's objectively bad is fontconfig configuration, which is quite arcane.
The OP doesn't even configure font rendering beyond the default, they're just adding macOS fonts to Linux.
A 27" 5K is 218 PPI, which is the minimum pixel density for desk work, IMO.
I completely disagree with that. 110 dpi is totally fine for desk work. Always has been and will probably continue to be for a really long time.
I take my 38" doing 3840x1600 at 110 DPI over a 27"K (or even two) doing 218 DPI any day.
Now if you do photography or work on designing bills (as in money), then you'll want higher DPI. But for "desk work", there's zero need for anything more than 110 DPI. It may be "nice" to have retina fonts but it's by not a requirement.
I'd even say the real world is powered by something like 95%+ of people doing "desk work" on 110 DPI (or less) screen.
Also, if 5K / 218 PPI is the "minimum pixel density" for desk work, what's the minimum density for creatives?
Personally I wouldn't take an ultrawide over a high PPI main display and "regular" PPI second display but that's purely a matter of preference.
By "desk work" I mean the type of work where the physical distance between your eyes and the display is ~50cm. Mobile devices like phones have higher pixel density because they are held closer to the eyes (~25cm) than a computer monitor on a desk. Angular pixel density is the important factor here.
As kitsunesoba mentioned, I find >200 PPI much easier on the eyes when reading and writing text, my eyes don't get nearly as fatigued as they do on low PPI displays.
I think it's one of those things that once you get used to high PPI displays, it's really hard to go back to low PPI. Have you looked at a pre-Retina iPhone or iPad recently? Would you take that over the high PPI display common on every mobile device today?
Then windows improved a lot (and I assume linux also did improve but honestly I stopped using Linux for the desktop long time ago so I don't remember) while MacOS support for low resolution text stagnated and I believe you if you say that on windows and/or Linux fonts may render better on low DPI than on a Mac.
But I have to nitpick your phrasing that MacOS hasn't been designed to run on non-hidpi: that can be right since the design is not something you just change due to neglect; a design is something that stays forever and you see vestiges of
macOS quite literally is not designed for non-hidpi displays anymore.
No, that’s not how it works - this is engineering, not Deepak Chopra. Apple is not big on backward compat and legacy and when a compromise has to be made to favor either their current line up or legacy/3rd party they always choose the former.
For instance new versions of macOS simply don’t support subpixel AA anymore because no standard Apple config involves non hidpi displays. Additionally, macOS renders via framebuffer scaling, not flexible UI scaling (with some good reasons for this compromise), but it’s a compromise and non retina font rendering suffers for it.
Correctly configured Windows and Linux offer superior font rendering on non HiDPI and Linux is easily tunable to be subjectively better on any config.
I don't have a citation handy, but I believe this was a conscious design choice to favor HiDPI displays.
I think it was the font smoothing feature.
Fortunately, you can remedy this by installing better fonts. Some people will even go so far as to install all the fonts from Windows and MacOS to give them the right look wherever they go.
Fortunately, I have found that you can enable subpixel AA in browsers and in CSS stylesheets, and that solves the problem. Just weird that subpixel AA is not on by default on non-retina displays.