No discussion of font rendering in Linux is complete without a hat tip to infinality, which aims to provide much better font rendering. infinality started out as a patch to freetype, and was recently merged in, which is quite exciting.
Ironically, the website is quite hard to read, thanks to a kind of simulated macular degeneration effect of drop-shadow glow around each letter. It amused me.
I can't find many examples of the effect of the infinality patches, though. Is it just a single-axis hinter?