I do usually select different fonts/sizes instead of relying on distro defaults though.
Anecdotally, I use PopOS as my daily driver and the fonts and DE are beautiful. I prefer it to the Mac workstation I use for work. When I flip my KVM I'm often reminded of the contrast. I use open source ligature enabled FreeType fonts and they are all exceedingly sharp.
Have I just been using Linux so long that I'm ignorant of what's possible on other systems? What am I missing?
There is a section on font rendering, here is a copy.
Font rendering (which is implemented via high level GUI libraries) issues:
! ClearType fonts are not properly supported out of the box. Even though the ClearType font rendering technology is now supported, you have no means of properly tuning it thus ClearType fonts from Windows look ugly.
Quite often default fonts look ugly, due to missing good (catered to the LCD screen - subpixel RGB full hinting) default fontconfig settings.
Font antialiasing settings cannot be applied on-the-fly under many DEs. This issue is impossible to solve unless there's a common GUI library/API which is shared between all tooklits and desktop environments.
!! The way Wayland works, fonts under Wayland sessions may look blurry.
I pasted the part related to font rendering here for convenience, but note that the article is much more complete and has a page-long preface explaining the context, and answers to the most common objections. The article is not a suggestion that you should use Windows instead, in fact the author also has a "Windows 10 sucks" article.
How is Windows font not rendering properly in Linux a Linux problem? Do we blame Windows for not supporting Linux specific software? Even so it seems to be possible to enable.
> Quite often default fonts look ugly, due to missing good (catered to the LCD screen - subpixel RGB full hinting) default fontconfig settings.
Highly opinionated, just change it, and the source is a slashdot comment from 2012? Really?
> Font antialiasing settings cannot be applied on-the-fly under many DEs
Okay, use one that supports it if that's the problem.
> The way Wayland works, fonts under Wayland sessions may look blurry.
Haven't made the switch yet, so can't say much about it.
All of these are very weird gripes and I'm even more confused that people don't use Linux because "fonts". Are these really the problems that make people stay on spyware OS?
My package manager describes it as A serif typeface designed by Matthew Carter for low resolution devices.
You are probably blessed with not having this font installed on your system, which prevents your browser from choosing it instead of Georgia.
I rarely encounter this problem though, I suppose there aren't many fonts that are only available as bitmap on most systems, and even fewer of them get used by websites.
I wish someone finds out why this is at some point. I'm a 90% Linux 10% windows user and I've been for many years. I've accepted the inferior mouse experience on Linux (not just one mouse, all mice I ever had on a number of pcs and laptops), but I hope it gets sorted at some point.