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Comment by mquander | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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?

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.

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