I use macOS, I use Linux, I don't have a problem with the fonts. In my opinion they all look great.
I'd say this though, macOS fonts generally look worse and too thick on a 1080p display.
Looking at the screenshots in the article, I personally prefer the "before" version.
On my Linux machine I use Deja Vu fonts for pretty much anything. I very intentionally don't install "Windows compatibility fonts" and the like. In my opinion it looks great, but someone else might have a different opinion.
I also used the classic "Xterm fixed" fonts for a long time and thought that looked great too (I switched to DejaVu Sans Mono a long time ago, mostly for better scaling) which still has a group of dedicated "fans" today, but many would probably consider it horrendous.
One thing I will say that's objectively bad is fontconfig configuration, which is quite arcane.
The OP doesn't even configure font rendering beyond the default, they're just adding macOS fonts to Linux.
Then windows improved a lot (and I assume linux also did improve but honestly I stopped using Linux for the desktop long time ago so I don't remember) while MacOS support for low resolution text stagnated and I believe you if you say that on windows and/or Linux fonts may render better on low DPI than on a Mac.
But I have to nitpick your phrasing that MacOS hasn't been designed to run on non-hidpi: that can be right since the design is not something you just change due to neglect; a design is something that stays forever and you see vestiges of
I think it was the font smoothing feature.
Fortunately, you can remedy this by installing better fonts. Some people will even go so far as to install all the fonts from Windows and MacOS to give them the right look wherever they go.
Fortunately, I have found that you can enable subpixel AA in browsers and in CSS stylesheets, and that solves the problem. Just weird that subpixel AA is not on by default on non-retina displays.
Since then I have yet to see an environment meet that bar, and have wasted no more time configuring X, fonts, compositors, themes, key binds, etc. I look forward to this changing one day, but I'm not expecting it soon. The ecosystem moves between technical targets too often to reach sufficient polish to meet the bar.
Making a font change to an open source project is a good way to attract angry replies in issue trackers if you’re not careful. The Perfect Configuration (TM) simply doesn’t exist.
In both of these images you can clearly see bad color bleed in the title bar font, and in the content font in the after case. I'm guessing the users main concern is that they want a higher text density which the after shot demonstrates. IMO both of these cases can be improved substantially to remove the color faults using grayscale subpixel rather than this colorful mess.
RGB subpixel has not looked good on any screen I've used in what about 10 years? The shapes of displays no longer produces good results with these techniques.
Why? Take a picture of your screen from close up with a modern phone and zoom in. You may see a non-RGB layout, but even if you don't you'll almost certainly observe a pattern where the empty space is significantly vertically larger around one boundary (often red/blue), this is related to the brightness targets monitors have been hitting for so long. As the pixels no longer align with the theoretical shape, if you can see the colors, the colors often look super trashy.
I generally replace the monospace/console font - but i do that on MacOS and windows too.
Tbh I find the lack of decent (tiled) wm (as well as broken display on "low-res" (1440p/QHD) external displays) on MacOS much more frustrating. I make do with yabai, but the hoops one needs to jump through and the resulting fragile setup isn't great.
Hm, now i came across this - so maybe there's a decent fix for that too?
Curious as to what's being referred to here. I've used 27" 2560x1440 displays with macOS for a long time, both with Intel and M-series Macs.
It's probably me, but font rendering sucks on macos. The out-of-the-box experience on external screens which are not hidpi is worse than windows XP. I needed all kinds of small tools and the commandline to make MacOS not do a terrible job. The macos forums have loads of complaints about this, of course almost all are answered with: "well, you got used to hi-dpi on your mac, that's how bad it looks on low-dpi screens, you should buy an thunderbolt/5k screen".
Btw, this used to be fine when i used MacOSX in ca 2012-2015. The subpixel hinting has explicitly been disabled since Mac mojave [1]
In short, the MacOS envy is highly misplaced.
[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/8wpk18/macos_mojave_...
And I also wish Terminal (not to mention XQuartz) rendered bitmap fonts properly (sharply) with antialiasing disabled. iTerm2 does it correctly, but it's sluggish compared to Terminal.
Fortunately I use HiDPI 99.9% of the time.
But I still wish they'd fix bitmap font rendering.
One thing I'd tweak for my own usage though is to use Inter[0] in place of TeX Gyre Heros for the sans-serif font. Inter, as its name suggests, is designed specifically for usage as a screen/UI font and has metrics extremely similar to those of San Francisco, which is the font that Apple has been using for its UIs for several years now. Inter also has broad language support with a wider variety of weights, so there's practically no situation in which it comes up lacking.
Wasn't aware of the Figma-related heritage, but real-world dog-fooding use helps explain the professionalism.
<edit name="autohint" mode="assign">
<bool>true</bool>
</edit>
<edit name="hinting" mode="assign">
<bool>true</bool>
</edit>
<edit mode="assign" name="hintstyle">
<const>hintslight</const>
</edit>
You'd achieve macOS style rendering on Linux by:
* disabling hinting completely (don't forget the auto hinter)
* disable subpixel anti-aliasing (use only grayscale full pixel anti-aliasing)
Then you need to find a way to enable sub-pixel positioning (which uses anti-aliasing to offset glyphs by fractions of a pixel). If your applications are all QT5/6 or GTK4, you're done, because this is enabled by default. Applications that use other text drawing methods (including GTK2/3 but probably others) may need additional adjustment. I think the only sure-fire way of doing it would be to patch Pango / Cairo.
Personally, I do most of the above but leave sub-pixel anti-aliasing enabled, because it works better on my low-DPI monitor.
The advice given on the page is outright wrong for a few reasons:
* it doesn't mention sub-pixel anti-aliasing at all (and leaves it enabled!)
* the before picture appears to have less hinting than the after picture, and therefore more macOS like (??)
* it doesn't mention sub-pixel positioning at all
This font config is what I've been using for ages: https://gist.github.com/radupotop/acec155e01a3b5c7ec9beff100...
Basically it boils down to: rgba=none, hinting=true, hintstyle=hintslight, antialias=true, with a few font replacement directives.
Having a High-DPI screen obviously helps. I found that 27 inch monitors with UHD resolutions to provide a good density at around 163 PPI.
It's worse with extended color gamut monitors. sRGB is necessary for the color weights to be properly balanced.
https://web.archive.org/web/20230531183821/https://aswinmoha...
Something else to note: Chrome/Chromium does its own font rasterization using Skia, and it tends to not abide by font settings.
I re-cropped the images myself, here's a link: https://imgur.com/a/KBljy6S
Wikipedia results on macOS Chrome https://i.imgur.com/uE6BZ3g.png
