this post was submitted on 12 Aug 2023
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The only time I remember spending any significant amount of time messing with font rendering on a Linux box in the last decade, it was because I was trying to convince it to use the old Macintosh bitmap fonts Chicago and Geneva (not the TrueType versions that B&H made, which in my opinion are ugly). That was an interesting little project.
Other than that, though, font rendering pretty much just works.
Font rendering works OK if you just use your PC for whatever, but for me as a developer I am staring at text all day so I need them as crisp and legible as they can be.
On Windows, out of the box the fonts render perfectly, meaning I can jump between my various editors and tools and just get to work. On Fedora (which I dual boot with currently), even the exact same fonts look like a mess compared to Windows. In particular, the Ubuntu Mono font looks like a completely different (and much nicer) font on Windows than it does on Fedora for me. The same was true for Mint as well which I used previously.
I've probably put several hours of effort messing with my .fonts.conf and Fontconfig settings to attempt to get it even close to as great as on Windows and nothing ever comes close. I'd love anybody to hand me a silver bullet and fix it but not a thing I've read online does.
If text legibility is a priority for you, you should consider a 4K+ display. The pixels on a standard display just aren't small enough to render text crisply, even with Windows' font renderer.
As for issues specifically with Ubuntu Mono, I can't help you there as I don't use it. I must say it's odd that it renders better on Windows than Linux, though, since it was presumably designed specifically for Linux.
That would be nice but the finances don't allow it currently. However, one shouldn't need a 4k monitor to get nice text rendering on Linux when it's perfectly fine on Windows on resolutions smaller than that.