Hacker News Reader

Comment by bretthoerner | Hacker News Reader

> I spend almost all of my time in firefox, emacs and a few other programs

Me too, and I have a Dell laptop in the mail that I'll be installing Ubuntu on and trying to use as my main machine.

But you know what isn't the same in all of these programs between OS X and Linux? Font rendering. I can get Linux to "OK" but OS X is always refreshing in comparison.

View on HN

Font rendering is a big one for me. For some reason Ubuntu always looks.. ugly.

The color scheme, font rendering, icons, etc, etc. Are there no designers in the open source community willing to help out? Or do the project leads not give a crap about design?

I personally find the Ubuntu out-of-the-box font rendering with the DejaVu font family on my laptop LCD to be on par aesthetically with Windows and OS X font rendering, so consider at least that there is an element of taste involved. (Unless some bug is making your fonts exceptionally bad for some reason.)

Unfortunately, I am personally unable to duplicate Ubuntu's pretty fonts on Gentoo, no matter how hard I configure X and fonts/local.conf.

The menus and title bars look great.

But open Firefox and and go to Gmail or something and compare it to OS X.

Even with msttcorefonts installed?

The problem is that it doesn't look good out of the box. I shouldn't have to hack a bunch of stuff together to get it working properly.

True - but when we start comparing it to Windows - (disable crapware, install firefox, install anti-virus, install iTunes) vs Ubuntu (install restricted-extras) then a Ubuntu setup starts looking pretty good.

Firefox, like OpenOffice.org, bundles its own renderer instead of using the OS's renderer. That's why Ubuntu fonts look good, and Firefox fonts look blurry.

In Arch the AUR directory has packages called fontconfig-ubuntu, cairo-ubuntu, and libxft-ubuntu , i found when i compiled those my font rendering was the same as ubuntus. Maybe Gentoo has the same packages, or you could grab the sources from AUR and compile them manually?

font rendering has always been a huge + on ubuntu for me

http://junk.arandomurl.com/type.jpg

which paragraph represents what?

1. OSX

2. Windows XP

3. Ubuntu

all plain installs

Reply on news.ycombinator.com