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I noticed since 2009 typical distros like Fedora or Ubuntu had these terrible anti-aliased fonts in every single program like Firefox or Gedit or any terminal emulator. Look at this first picture. It's not even blurry, it's something worse. You see lines of what is supposed to be blur on the edges of every letter (for example, the tops of o and e, the sides of f and I). What the hell _is_ that? It _never_ worked. If you use a program that uses subpixel rendering, it's just as bad or worse. Look at this second pic. Aside from the color fringing, the g looks again half way blurry and half way pixelated. It's just trash. Somehow Windows did subpixel rendering better (much better), since XP. IIRC there are some patents around this, but I think Linux subpixel rendering is just deliberately broken. Almost every monitor from 1999-2022 is ~100PPI. This means, you have to move it back about 7 feet before you can't see the pixels, and my vision is below average. What the hell is wrong with Linux GUI devs? Non-AA fonts are perfect for 100PPI because they are well defined and more performant. Why not just use that? I always have to configure to fix this. Here, the 3rd pic of typing this up captures the aids perfectly. The r just looks like two vertical lines instead of what it's meant to be (one vertical line next to a darker vertical line, shown in the zoomed in screenshot).

>>65940 >Somehow Windows did subpixel rendering better (much better), since XP. I don't know what you are talking about. I think MacOSX and Linux have better anti-aliasing than Windows. But I haven't used Fedora or Ubuntu in a long time (I use Arch btw). I always disable ClearType on Windows.

What are you talking about? How can you see pixels from *7 feet* away?

>>65958 Dude is using the jumbotron for his monitor.

What you're seeing is that LCD pixels aren't like your scaled images, but are surrounded by black borders. The monitor will just show two lines beside other, with a smaller black line in between them, defeating the attempted antialiasing effect. This is also why black font looks better than other shades (when both have no antialiasing). LCD panels take up around 20-33% of each pixel horizontally with black space (this example LCD being particularly bad). In practice though, pixels on an LCD are surrounded by a black border, not just horizontally (not sure why, but it visually looks like this without a lens). I also attached a version of your image that more accurately shows what the LCD will show, and one of my own worse examples. You can simply look at the unscaled text in those images up close to the monitor and see the borders around them. Subpixel rendering also doesn't work. On LCD (what it's intended for), you get color fringes due to the viewing angle problem (different colors change at different amounts at a given angle), as well as when scrolling text (each subpixel involved in the scrolling changes at a different rate). And of course different subpixel layouts break it and break screenshots, including actual good monitors like some OLEDs and CRT. Tools like redshift and f.lux will also break subpixel rendering, as will adjusting the color on your monitor menu.

it's just soykaf. even the 10 million dollar typography looks like crap on 90-100 PPI monitors. should have just stuck with what obviously works which is single pixel wide no-AA fonts for the last 20 years and avoided the thousands of RCE bugs caused by the alternative. mac users could use their anti-aliased fonts because they have double pixel density. meanwhile the rest of us should have just used single pixel wide fonts. i bet half of the reason why linux desktops have been slow for the last 20 years is because of all the fancy font rendering soykaf which as shown still looks horrible. typical marketing first retardation.

yeah I know what you mean OP, i miss those fonts so much, made x look so much better. the modern fonts we have now are just sad, pale imitations of '''clean'''' fonts that osx and windows has and they do not look good and honestly they hurt my frickin eyes, SADLY it is not possible to 100% use these fonts anymore in modern x + modern x applications, breaks my heart theyre called bitmapped fonts, i really do miss having a cool little mwm or openlooks setup with lots of assorted random trashy gadgets from wmaker or afterstep or project athena/various motif widgets and those fonts just made them look so natural, god do i miss them but i'd settle for a working plan 9 vga font on linux

What are you even complaining about? Turning this off or using bitmap fonts instead has always been possible, this really is a non-issue. Just put in your .Xresources Xft.autohint: 0 Xft.lcdfilter: lcdnone Xft.hintstyle: hintnone Xft.hinting: 0 Xft.antialias: 0 And don’t forget to call xrdb.

>>65940 You can force ubuntu fonts to be unaliased sharp like XP fonts. I think fonts thing on linux is just a mess, even otf/ttf renders differently over browser/android/gtk/qt QT I think does rendering by far the best but it's not like they ship firefox or chrome in qt, they're mostly gtk-compiled so they only respect gtk-related font configurations along with fontconfig. fonts are broken really I mean seriously, arch's local.conf fontconfig is still being shipped broken (mode=assign does not work as shipped) It's also painful to just make emoji works and inject it into sans-serif on a font that doesn't have emoji by default (e.g, anything not Noto), fallbacks also cause a severe bug, like after a chinese font or a group of text in browser containing cjk fonts it would cause the serif font to use the fallback profile of the cjk font itself and not use the real sans fallback. even setting emojis fallback on serif causes severe crashes. You also need to manually set metric compatible fonts so it looks natural, Since fonts actually have their own correct sizes basing it in years of real-world typography. Iirc 12pt is standard for times or most serifed font (rarely used but keep in mind, for metric compatibility purposes) and 11pt for most others, a system font straying from that wouldn't be ideal though heavily dependent on your screen's DPI, the standard is 96 and whole multiples of it. No fractional DPI as this messes with true-to-pixel font sizes unless you could make them all match perfectly. If you're still seeing grainy stuff I think your monitor just has bad pixel pitch (the dark gap between the pixels) These are from my research the only best fonts for linux: >en: Ubuntu/Ubuntu Mono with /no aliasing >ko: Batang (get it from windows) /no aliasing >cn: Sun-ExtA http://www.alanwood.net/downloads/index.html /no aliasing >AR PL New Sung /no aliasing Although its still terrible, bold fonts aren't implemented properly, plus it's also different with gnome stuff, kde also usually tries to embolden a font instead of using the bold font style or gnome just doesn't work. I think browsers have better implementation though it still looks terrible since sub-pixel rendering is terrible on gtk (and firefox/chrome are both gtk-compiled for font rendering at least). KDE is good with slight hinting and sub-pixel rendering but that's if you use falkon only (it's also not compatible with gnome/gtk programs and may not work on standalone qt6 too, or even appimages and similar since they use different config files and version mismatch may occur if they do try to read your system fontconfig files!) A total mess.