Mac OS X is perfectly good, but it doesn't tend to feel as nice as Ubuntu. Especially when you get to things like Indic scripts.
Windows' font rendering (I can only speak for up to Windows 7) is still quite nasty, especially at larger font sizes. The lack of vertical antialiasing ruins it for these cases.
Weird, I would consider that Windows has the best font rendering. Do you have any example photos you'd like to show?
A comment below [1] has some pictures, do you really find Windows's rendering to be bad?
Perhaps it's partially due to the fact that Mac laptops and iDevices have higher quality displays than typical Windows machines?
OSX uses antialiasing, which means the fonts have a nice shape, but they are fuzzy, blurry, and to some users headache-inducing.
Windows reshapes the fonts so they fit perfectly in the pixel grid, but the shape is not what will be printed, and it looks ugly to some users.
Because people like what they are used to, and because Apple vs Microsoft is already a flame war, no-one can really agree.
I've been using Arch Linux as my only OS for more than 5 years, and the only certain applications have given me font-related trouble. Firefox somehow doesn't select the correct alternative (even though fontconfig works fine).
Also, take into account that Linux is not Ubuntu. It's a growing trend to identify Linux with Ubuntu, as if other distributions (or even other desktop environments in the same Ubuntu distro) weren't to take into account. Have you seen KDE font rendering? Open a Chromium browser, navigate to some pages, it's awful.
Of course, "awful" is subjective so you might prefer the way KDE and LXDE render fonts. But it doesn't change the fact that they're different.
And that FreeType is not Linux only.
http://i.imgur.com/4dGbR.png (Ubuntu)
http://i.imgur.com/mfyjw.png (OS X)
http://i.imgur.com/BqOdg.png (Windows 7)
Ubuntu does not install Microsoft fonts by default. It will fallback to Ubuntu's default font.
(Like, a half hour ago, I checked that Verdana was installed and then recreated the screenshot from the original post and it's identical as far as I can tell.
Right-click the text and choose "Inspect element". In the right-hand column, make sure "Computed" is selected at the top, then look to see what font-family is being rendered. (If you click "Rules" at the top, you can see which rules are active.)
The '3' doesn't look any more different than other chars due to rendering difference, to me.
And KDE's font manager's take on Verdana: http://i.imgur.com/4c5cSe3.png
And Firefox on my system, just as a reference: http://i.imgur.com/a2yZ7UQ.png
There are differences with how the text is rendered. Maybe it has to do with kerning and subpixel optimizations.
Yup, pretty much. A trio of Spolsky/Atwood posts from 2007 worth reading:
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2007/06/whats-wrong-with-ap...
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2007/06/12.html
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2007/06/font-rendering-resp...
The others are just way too blurry.
Seriously? I could agree that it may not fully represent the intended font, but the entire point is that it's more legible when it sacrifices that, and I find it hard to believe that you find Windows's text to be less legible than Mac's/Ubuntu's.
i.e. I think Windows sacrifices the fontmaker's intent in order to please the reader, who couldn't care less about the fontmaker's intentions rather than the actual output (unless the reader is the fontmaker himself).
Do you really think it's failing in that too?
This is somewhat subjective, and you might have a different opinion, but there is more than one variable in play when it comes to legibility, it doesn't just come down to how sharp the text is.
But I couldn't care less about the font being deformed, as long as it looked better than it used to. The fact that you seem to care so much about the deformation into a different font seems to imply to me that your goal is to preserve the original font, rather than to make it look nice on the screen.
If you have the time, would you mind taking the pictures in the comment below and making a smaller bitmap that shows exactly which character(s) you think are not kerned well, and which Linux or Mac kerns better? I'm really curious what I'm not seeing.