About 20 years ago I used some early version of KDE on Linux as my desktop environment and it was great - comparable and even better than Windows that times. Nowadays I still struggle to use any kind of Linux GUI first of all because of poor fonts rendering. Don't get me wrong - it's pretty OK, but comparing with MacOS or Windows - ah, still to bad. Have been waiting for improvements for decades.
Can you give some specific examples that bother you? I honestly just don't notice much of a difference these days with font rendering in Linux + X11 vs Windows/MacOS.
I do usually select different fonts/sizes instead of relying on distro defaults though.
Anecdotally, I use PopOS as my daily driver and the fonts and DE are beautiful. I prefer it to the Mac workstation I use for work. When I flip my KVM I'm often reminded of the contrast. I use open source ligature enabled FreeType fonts and they are all exceedingly sharp.
I see so many complaints about font rendering on Linux but I don't really understand the issue and what you're experiencing. I use a window manager, no desktop environment and zero configuration for fonts other than what comes with the distributions minimal/server release.
Have I just been using Linux so long that I'm ignorant of what's possible on other systems? What am I missing?
There is a section on font rendering, here is a copy.
Font rendering (which is implemented via high level GUI libraries) issues:
! ClearType fonts are not properly supported out of the box. Even though the ClearType font rendering technology is now supported, you have no means of properly tuning it thus ClearType fonts from Windows look ugly.
Quite often default fonts look ugly, due to missing good (catered to the LCD screen - subpixel RGB full hinting) default fontconfig settings.
Font antialiasing settings cannot be applied on-the-fly under many DEs. This issue is impossible to solve unless there's a common GUI library/API which is shared between all tooklits and desktop environments.
!! The way Wayland works, fonts under Wayland sessions may look blurry.
Edit following worksonmine response:
I pasted the part related to font rendering here for convenience, but note that the article is much more complete and has a page-long preface explaining the context, and answers to the most common objections. The article is not a suggestion that you should use Windows instead, in fact the author also has a "Windows 10 sucks" article.
> ClearType fonts are not properly supported out of the box. Even though the ClearType font rendering technology is now supported, you have no means of properly tuning it thus ClearType fonts from Windows look ugly.
How is Windows font not rendering properly in Linux a Linux problem? Do we blame Windows for not supporting Linux specific software? Even so it seems to be possible to enable.
> Quite often default fonts look ugly, due to missing good (catered to the LCD screen - subpixel RGB full hinting) default fontconfig settings.
Highly opinionated, just change it, and the source is a slashdot comment from 2012? Really?
> Font antialiasing settings cannot be applied on-the-fly under many DEs
Okay, use one that supports it if that's the problem.
> The way Wayland works, fonts under Wayland sessions may look blurry.
Haven't made the switch yet, so can't say much about it.
All of these are very weird gripes and I'm even more confused that people don't use Linux because "fonts". Are these really the problems that make people stay on spyware OS?
I very rarely notice it, but this very article to me is displayed in Bitstream Charter (I think because it contains one character somewhere that isn't present in Georgia) and Bitstream Charter is awfully bad for some reason, probably because I have it in PCF format.
My package manager describes it as A serif typeface designed by Matthew Carter for low resolution devices.
You are probably blessed with not having this font installed on your system, which prevents your browser from choosing it instead of Georgia.
I rarely encounter this problem though, I suppose there aren't many fonts that are only available as bitmap on most systems, and even fewer of them get used by websites.
KDE 3.5 was its peak for me. KDE 4 changed everything around completely, in a worse way (like no more multiple task bars, no more easy launcher icons, introduction of hard to disable CPU hogging background processes like baloo, less configuration, degradation in contrast of scrollbars in the theme choices, etc...).
If you haven't, try KDE 5 as well. I also found KDE 3.5 to be an amazing desktop and was then very disappointed by KDE 4, one of the worst software released I've used. But it was pretty much abandoned relatively quickly and KDE 5 is once again an excellent environment.
You know what is my pet peeve with Linux guis? Mouse movement. Why is it that despite spending a collective week of work hours on it and testing every single acceleration band speed setting it still feels like my mouse is imprecise and slow at the same time I use windows for a while and then go back to Linux?
Could it be that you have mouse acceleration turned off on Linux? Mouse acceleration makes the mouse pointer move further if you move the mouse faster. It's an option to turn on/off on KDE, and it's the way GNOME is set up unless you install GNOME Tweaks.
I've tried, with and without, I tried various settings (there are quite a few mouse acceleration related settings). But I could never find something that even approximated windows speed of movement and precision at the same time.
I wish someone finds out why this is at some point. I'm a 90% Linux 10% windows user and I've been for many years. I've accepted the inferior mouse experience on Linux (not just one mouse, all mice I ever had on a number of pcs and laptops), but I hope it gets sorted at some point.
