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Comment by acephal | Hacker News Reader

Last I touched a Linux desktop was 10+ years ago and you had to muck about with FontConfig and third-party config packages to even come close to Windows or macOS type rendering. Has this seen significant improvement?

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I uninstalled my Bazzite partition because of the text. Initial searches showed similar frustrations on reddit without obvious and immediate fixes, so I decided to cut my losses and go back to using Windows full time instead of spending hours or days trying to get the rendering to an acceptable level.

This was my experience when trying to get fonts to look good in Ubuntu about a year ago. FontConfig, Gnome and of course some individual apps like browsers all have their own little settings for font rendering that interact in weird and not so wonderful ways.

I recently switched from Chrome to Firefox and realized that kerning is completely broken. I can only assume that it's because of some setting that I changed but I'd rather reinstall the whole machine than go on a wild goose chase...

Don't quote me, but if I recall some number of years ago there were some font shaping/AA patents that expired and so good font rendering comes out of the box in most cases these days. Used to be only Ubuntu shipped like that.

I run Debian with KDE on Wayland on my desktop PC. Font rendering seems perfectly fine. I can't speak for other combos.

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