Linux apps pretty much universally do font rendering via FreeType. Have you tried switching to Cantarell? I for one fell in love with Inter UI back when I used Plasma.
FWIW if anyone else comes back to this I spent a little time last night and I've addressed my font rendering issues by;
* Removing an errant font-config lcdfilter configuration entry (this was a left over from when I was running "infinality" and should have been removed)
* Switching font from Noto Sans to Ubuntu
Its not perfect, but its a lot better. I'll probably play with oversampling (rendering X at a higher resolution and scaling down like OSX) at some point to see if I get the quality I want.
