10 ms·

MacOS-like Fonts on Manjaro/Arch Linux

170 points by aswinmohanme 6y ago

mateuszf 6y ago
And no screenshot? That would be useful.
kuon 6y ago
I agree that MacOS fonts look nice, and also that Linux can look really bad if not configured properly. But that has been less an issue with modern GUI oriented distributions which configure fonts quite well out of the box. It is still very cool to be able to tune fonts that precisely on Linux, and it's a major feature. Also, on many linux distribution you can modify your font configuration per user, here ~/.config/fontconfig/fonts.conf (path may vary).
- secondcoming 6y ago
  I find Linux's font handling weird. I use consolas for programming and on the same system it can look different in different editors. And then it never really looks the same as it does on Windows despite being the same TTF. I don't really have the patience to faff about with font config files, it should 'just work'.
  - Drew_ 6y ago
    3rd party applications/editors can render fonts however they'd like. VS Code's font rendering is almost certainly not native and I don't think Chrome's font rendering is either.
    - damieng 6y ago
      Chrome uses Skia which - on Windows - uses DirectWrite which is basically native however... DirectWrite has a whole bunch of flags that configure sub-pixel and anti-aliasing as well as natural widths etc. So it might not look the same. To make matters worse it changes what settings it uses depending on the size of the type IIRC and even had a few font-specific tweaks there as well. Windows apps in general might not look the same depending on whether they are using GDI, GDI+, DirectWrite (all considered native) and any combination of those flags... and of course it depends on whether the user has ClearType turned on and if they have used the Tuner to calibrate the rendering further for their preference...
- YorickPeterse 6y ago
  I've found it's not so much the distribution, but the desktop environment, combined with an HiDPI display. I think I haven't had the need for any special changes in years, other than maybe changing the hinting style based on personal preference.
- II2II 6y ago
  > It is still very cool to be able to tune fonts that precisely on Linux, and it's a major feature. Agreed. While much of the discussion surrounds making font rendering more Mac-like, fontconfig enables people to modify font rendering to suit their personal needs. For example: one user can turn off anti-aliasing to enjoy sharper fonts, while another turn it on to enjoy more accurate font rendering. Heck, you can even tweak things down to the font and application level without relying upon each program exposing that functionality. This is not the sort of feature that will appeal to many people, but it is incredibly useful for those who use it.
whylo 6y ago
The headline's a little misleading IMO - this article isn't about making Linux render text like macOS does (hinting and anti-aliasing methods etc), it's just about replacing the default fonts Edit: Headline's been changed, it was "Get macOS like font rendering on Linux"
- oconnor663 6y ago
  It was only a few years ago that, if you didn't want everything to look like crap, you needed to install Infinality-patched libs and explicitly configure font hinting. How far we've come.
  - zem 6y ago
    it was also astonishingly hard to do. turns out just because you can tell things don't look quite as nice doesn't mean you know how to tweak the infinality settings to achieve a better look - or at least i didn't. i finally gave up and went back to the default fonts. (ubuntu looked much nicer at the time, but even the package that claimed to reproduce ubuntu fonts on arch didn't quite work)
  - Jnr 6y ago
    Few years? Last time I had to install Infinality patchset was about 10 years ago. Font rendering on Archlinux has been looking great for years now.
- jrrrr 6y ago
  I was thrown by this, too, hoping to read about rasterization.
pantulis 6y ago
If a correctly remember the consensus was that font rendering is even better in Windows?
- ladyanita22 6y ago
  There's no consensus. Cleartype is the most advanced technology out there AFAIK, because it considers many things macOS' font rendering method does ignore. However, the end result is that fonts get distorded heavily, whereas other OS such as macOS, iOS, Linux and Android do respect the fonts' original shape.
  - chrismorgan 6y ago
    macOS does its own peculiar brand of glyph dilation. A couple of links about this: https://twitter.com/pcwalton/status/918991457532354560 https://twitter.com/pcwalton/status/918991457532354560, https://twitter.com/pcwalton/status/918593367914803201 https://twitter.com/pcwalton/status/918593367914803201. I would count this as heavy distortion, far heavier than anything any other platform may do.
  - snazz 6y ago
    Here's my (somewhat oversimplified) take: - macOS uses no sub pixel hinting since High Sierra. Instead, it's just grayscale antialiasing. To make up for the unnatural thinness that occurs when grayscale antialiasing is used, fonts are artificially bolded by a small amount. - Linux/FreeType uses very nice-looking sub pixel hinting and maintains the clarity of fonts pretty well. The spacing between characters may not be pixel-perfect, if I remember correctly. - Windows/ClearType snaps fonts to the pixel grid very aggressively, resulting in some amount of distortion. Many of the default Windows fonts look really good with ClearType, while others appear strange, especially at smaller sizes. In terms of technology, ClearType is the most advanced.
    - baybal2 6y ago
      > The spacing between characters may not be pixel-perfect, if I remember correctly. Behdad has since axed usage of hints from True/OpenType fonts. Though the rationality of "more precise positioning" is kind of irrelevant on modern HiDPI screens.
SamuelAdams 6y ago
Why don't people just grab the San Francisco fonts off GitHub? [1]: https://github.com/search?q=san+francisco+font https://github.com/search?q=san+francisco+font
- tiffanyh 6y ago
  Apple’s license I don’t believe grants you those rights. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/32178464/is-possible-to-use-san-francisco-font-on-website-free https://stackoverflow.com/questions/32178464/is-possible-to-...
  - duhi88 6y ago
    You can use it on your own computer, you just can't publish content with it that isn't iOS-related. They're not going to come knock on your door because you've set SF to be your system font.
- jfk13 6y ago
  Some people prefer to respect copyright.
- bzb5 6y ago
  The result would be the San Francisco font... rendered terribly.
  - aswinmohanme 6y ago
    Yes, I have tried SanFransisco and the results were terrible. Also I didn't want to look at information rendered by a stolen font.
    - bzb5 6y ago
      Digital information cannot be stolen.
      - Shared404 6y ago
javier10e6 6y ago
Papyrus...https://youtu.be/jVhlJNJopOQ https://youtu.be/jVhlJNJopOQ
- badwolf 6y ago
  That's amazing. Thank you for bringing a hearty chuckle to my morning coffee.
xenonite 6y ago
I still don't understand how the removal of subpixel rendering in macOS 10.14 is not yet reversed. I can visually relax much more when I work on my 10.11 El Capitan systems.
- TehCorwiz 6y ago
  As screens gain resolution pixels get smaller. At some point there's a trade-off between computation power and effect. At some point sub-pixel rendering is indistinguishable from pure integer pixel rendering to the human eye on higher-resolution screens. 100% speculation: Apple has a history of very narrowly supporting only their latest few generations of equipment. It's possible that they're ignoring "legacy" devices in these decisions with the justification probably being that "They'll buy a new one eventually anyway." Edit: added missing words.
  - tambourine_man 6y ago
    >Apple has a history of very narrowly supporting only their latest few generations of equipment. It has no such history, quite the opposite. You can install the latest OS on 5 year old phones and 8 year old Macs.
    - danhor 6y ago
      I mean, that's only the latest few generations. Android is worse for sure, but Windows does seem to support old PCs as long as the specs aren't as so bad as to be beaten by an older raspberry pi.
      - tambourine_man 6y ago
        > I mean, that's only the latest few generations. What do you mean by few? Apple releases new phones every single year and has for the past 12. 5 years means 5 generations.
- crazygringo 6y ago
  Because 1) the Mac world has moved onto high-DPI screens mainly, 2) subpixel rendering provides virtually no benefit on high-DPI screens, and 3) subpixel rendering adds a ton of complications across the board (you can't scale anything, for starters), and was always hacky to begin with -- e.g. taking a screenshot and putting it on the internet gives it a rainbow halo effect on everyone else's screen Honestly, these days with graphics cards that support Retina, the "right" way to do subpixel rendering on non-Retina screens wouldn't be with fonts at all. It would be to render everything internally normally at 3x resolution (3x horizontal by 1x vertical), and then apply subpixel rendering to the whole screen when downscaling for display. But with so few non-Retina screens being used by Mac users, why bother?
isoprophlex 6y ago
I don't care much about the fonts, i guess I'm the person who doesn't care about typography. i want my linux mouse pointer to behave as under macos. I can't quite put my finger on it, but somehow on Linux (Mint cinnamon) the pointer always ends up in a place just slightly off from where I expect it to be. Also the movement feels jerky...
- xthetrfd 6y ago
  Well if you find it let me know. Also normal wheel scrolling
  - isoprophlex 6y ago
    I've thrown away half a day trying to figure out how to get the scroll wheel to behave. No cigar. It still scrolls one line at a time in a terminal, and two pages at a time in firefox.
    - bleepblorp 6y ago
      Try severely reducing the value of mousewheel.default.delta_multiplier_y in your Firefox about:config.
      - isoprophlex 6y ago
        Thanks! Never realised there could be a per-program setting to fiddle with!
        bleepblorp 6y ago
        Most programs don't have internal settings for this, but Firefox does things its own way--and tends to break regularly because of it. Also try reducing mousewheel.min_line_scroll_amount if changing the other setting doesn't help. Try a value of 16.
      - jdalgetty 6y ago
jamil7 6y ago
Ah I went through this, then trying to get the trackpad to work as nicely as macOS and then trying to get universal shortcuts that work nicely across the whole system... and then realised I'd created a crappier version of macOS inside Linux and switched back. Edit: just to clarify I'm not bashing Linux, more my usecase.
- jeroenhd 6y ago
  There's a project working on exactly that, improved trackpad designs. Support varies between trackpads, but from what I've seen there's a lot of progress in this area. As far as I know, shortcuts are already pretty much global. Keyboard navigation, copy/paste, open/close/save, it all pretty much follows the same Windows standards. It takes time to learn to use all the shortcuts though, and a lot of them aren't intuitive. I've had the same experience when I tried macOS, none of the shortcuts made sense and behaviour was often non-intuitive coming from a non-Apple platform. If you're happy with macOS you should totally stick with macOS, but luckily there's people working hard on solving the most glaring issues with modern UIs. Once trackpad support improves, a lot of people might feel a lot better at home than they do right now.
  - jamil7 6y ago
    I've actually seen the trackpad project which is really cool. The issue I had with shortcuts was finding consistency across different software, the basics but also all the text manipulation shortcuts that exist globally on macOS, it felt as though everytime I downloaded something new I needed to set it up again. It's quite possible I hadn't configured everything correctly though.
  - kohtatsu 6y ago
    Command+, to bring up preferences is surefire, does linux/windows have the same yet? I remember Command+W not working as consistently as well. Word and like jumps in Windows also felt backwards to me, doing the equivalent of w instead of e in vim, and couldn't be consistently combined with shift. Support for Alt+Dpad(+Shift) and Command+Dpad(+Shift) is important IMO. As well as Double/Triple-click+Drag: it should select additional units not letters. These last paragraphs are OS-level but the features were missing or inconsistent.
abrowne 6y ago
Personally all my Linux machines use Adobe Source Sans as the default font, but Inter would be my replacement for San Francisco. https://rsms.me/inter/ https://rsms.me/inter/
- supernintendo 6y ago
  +1 for Inter. I’ve been using it as my system font on KDE for years and it renders really well at every display resolution I’ve tried. I’m picky about my OS fonts too.
- robsalasco 6y ago
  nice font! what are you using as terminal font?
  - abrowne 6y ago
    I use Adobe Source Sans and Source Code. With Inter, I'd probably use Hack, an update on the great DejaVu Mono which was also the source of Apple's Menlo, their previous default. It shares some features with Inter like a single-story g.
  - approxim8ion 6y ago
    I use JetBrains Mono now but I've also used Source Code Pro before. Really good fonts.
baybal2 6y ago
> <edit mode="assign" name="hintstyle"><const>hintslight</const></edit> Nor GTK, nor Qt do support "full" hinting as of few recent releases. Pango, and Harfbuzz sacrificed that ability in exchange for subpixel letter positioning.
winter_blue 6y ago
The way Arial (or "sans serif" in general) renders by default on Linux has always irked me. It's got annoying proportions, and just seems off. What really sucks is that websites like Wikipedia use it, and you have to suffer reading this horrible font. I'm super-thankful for this post. I'm definitely going to try this out. Thank you again!
tmcb 6y ago
Back when I was a Linux user, I used to do almost the same thing. With regards to the fonts, though, I preferred the URW Nimbus familiy[1], which I found by accident on a pre-installed Debian package. I have also experimented with the GNU FreeFont family[2], although I recommend the former. [1] https://www.urwtype.com/en/shop/?fontshop=datei%3Asearch_db%3Bsearchstring%3ANimbus https://www.urwtype.com/en/shop/?fontshop=datei%3Asearch_db%... --- Sorry I couldn't find a better link. [2] https://www.gnu.org/software/freefont/ https://www.gnu.org/software/freefont/
- aswinmohanme 6y ago
  I really like the Nimbus family and it was my goto Interface font before TeX Gyre came along. Also loved the FreeFont family, it was what I used before Nimbus.
varbhat 6y ago
To tweak font settings , see https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/fonts https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/fonts I currently use https://github.com/belluzj/fantasque-sans https://github.com/belluzj/fantasque-sans for Monspaced Font. For everything else, I use Noto Sans. Looks Well.
- noisy_boy 6y ago
  Fantasque-sans used to be my favorite for monospaced font - still like it a lot. Now a days, I use Fira Code which also looks quite good.
butz 6y ago
Here's how to install more default font replacements on Fedora: https://github.com/silenc3r/fedora-better-fonts https://github.com/silenc3r/fedora-better-fonts Would be great if Linux distributions provided similar expanded font setup out of the box.
megous 6y ago
It's hard to go back to scalable fonts after getting used to absolutely crisp bitmap font in my text editor on Linux. I don't care about the font shape, but the difference in sharpness on regular screens is so startling.
swebs 6y ago
Eh, I don't get it. When looking at the before and after screenshots of Wikipedia, I greatly prefer the "before" fonts. It looks easier to read and less squished. Though they both suffer from the much bigger problem where the lower case L is indistinguishable from the capital i.
- fanatic2pope 6y ago
  I was going to make the same point that this only really makes sense if you are used to the way that Mac OS renders fonts. I switched back to Linux a couple of years ago and this is one reason why at this point I just couldn't go back.
- kijin 6y ago
  Back when flat-panel displays first became mainstream, Microsoft and Apple took different directions as to how to utilize subpixel rendering. Microsoft chose to align strokes as close as possible to pixel boundaries for a sharp, crisp look even if it meant distorting the shape of the glyphs. Apple on the other hand decided to render fonts as close as possible to their original shapes even if it caused some blurriness around pixel boundaries. Linux made its own flavor of both options, and left it to the user to decide which one they wanted. The default on many distros is closer to the Windows look, though. So if you are used to the Windows look, you will probably prefer the default option than the tweaked-to-look-like-Mac option.
DictumMortuum 6y ago
I'm more of a fira sans / fira code guy. However, setting up the fonts that you want on linux can be a bit tricky and I've lost many hours trying to get a config that does it for me, so good job for the guidance that you provide.
bachmeier 6y ago
> Either you love gorgeous typography or just don’t care. If you are the former read ahead on how to make the font rendering on your Linux look just as awesome as that on macOS, else read on to find out what beauty you have been missing. Not an impressive way to start. I do not like the fonts on MacOS at all. IMO Mac fonts are the worst of all the major OSes. Windows, Linux, and ChromeOS are all better than the atrocity that is Mac fonts. Of course, that is because I use those other OSes more than MacOS, so they're the basis for me to decide what is "correct".
- duhi88 6y ago
  Obviously this just comes down to personal preference. All the major companies have poured lots of money into engineering typefaces specifically for their UI and brand. They're all designed to be easy to read and give off just enough personality to not be distracting. Objectively, I'd be surprised if one were better than another. I like some of the open source sans serif fonts just as much as Apple's SF fonts. Google's Roboto has a bit too much personality IMO, but it might be better tuned for Android than the web.
suhail 6y ago
Why not use Roboto which is shockingly similar?
pier25 6y ago
After using hiDPI monitors for years (Mac, Windows, Android, iOS) both examples look horrible to me.
g42gregory 6y ago
Is there any way to make Ubuntu web browser (any) rendering closer to MacOS? When I browse the Web on my MacBook Pro, it’s really pleasing to the eye. When I do the same on Ubuntu,- not so much. Is there any way to fix it?
asix66 6y ago
If you want to make this configuration local for your login (user) only, put the xml config into: $HOME/.config/fontconfig/fonts.conf Rather than the global one in /etc/fonts Reference: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Font_configuration#Fontconfig_configuration https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Font_configuration#Font...
29athrowaway 6y ago
Some ways this article could be improved: - /et/... should be /etc/... - not assuming your editor is neovim. - not assuming those fonts are installed. Some people like the font hinting and antialiasing in macOS. I don't. Fonts get really thick and hard to read. Retina mode makes fonts vastly more readable but it requires a $1000+ Apple monitor. On Linux I can plug a $300 monitor, switch resolution to 4k, set display scaling to 2x and save myself $700+.
clircle 6y ago
One of the top three reasons I use Ubuntu: no fiddling with fonts. They look good out of the box. There's enough things to fiddle with on linux.

170 points by aswinmohanme 6y ago

And no screenshot? That would be useful.

kuon 6y ago

I agree that MacOS fonts look nice, and also that Linux can look really bad if not configured properly. But that has been less an issue with modern GUI oriented distributions which configure fonts quite well out of the box. It is still very cool to be able to tune fonts that precisely on Linux, and it's a major feature. Also, on many linux distribution you can modify your font configuration per user, here ~/.config/fontconfig/fonts.conf (path may vary).

secondcoming 6y ago
I find Linux's font handling weird. I use consolas for programming and on the same system it can look different in different editors. And then it never really looks the same as it does on Windows despite being the same TTF. I don't really have the patience to faff about with font config files, it should 'just work'.
- Drew_ 6y ago
  3rd party applications/editors can render fonts however they'd like. VS Code's font rendering is almost certainly not native and I don't think Chrome's font rendering is either.
  - damieng 6y ago
    Chrome uses Skia which - on Windows - uses DirectWrite which is basically native however... DirectWrite has a whole bunch of flags that configure sub-pixel and anti-aliasing as well as natural widths etc. So it might not look the same. To make matters worse it changes what settings it uses depending on the size of the type IIRC and even had a few font-specific tweaks there as well. Windows apps in general might not look the same depending on whether they are using GDI, GDI+, DirectWrite (all considered native) and any combination of those flags... and of course it depends on whether the user has ClearType turned on and if they have used the Tuner to calibrate the rendering further for their preference...
YorickPeterse 6y ago
I've found it's not so much the distribution, but the desktop environment, combined with an HiDPI display. I think I haven't had the need for any special changes in years, other than maybe changing the hinting style based on personal preference.
II2II 6y ago
> It is still very cool to be able to tune fonts that precisely on Linux, and it's a major feature. Agreed. While much of the discussion surrounds making font rendering more Mac-like, fontconfig enables people to modify font rendering to suit their personal needs. For example: one user can turn off anti-aliasing to enjoy sharper fonts, while another turn it on to enjoy more accurate font rendering. Heck, you can even tweak things down to the font and application level without relying upon each program exposing that functionality. This is not the sort of feature that will appeal to many people, but it is incredibly useful for those who use it.

whylo 6y ago

The headline's a little misleading IMO - this article isn't about making Linux render text like macOS does (hinting and anti-aliasing methods etc), it's just about replacing the default fonts Edit: Headline's been changed, it was "Get macOS like font rendering on Linux"

oconnor663 6y ago
It was only a few years ago that, if you didn't want everything to look like crap, you needed to install Infinality-patched libs and explicitly configure font hinting. How far we've come.
- zem 6y ago
  it was also astonishingly hard to do. turns out just because you can tell things don't look quite as nice doesn't mean you know how to tweak the infinality settings to achieve a better look - or at least i didn't. i finally gave up and went back to the default fonts. (ubuntu looked much nicer at the time, but even the package that claimed to reproduce ubuntu fonts on arch didn't quite work)
- Jnr 6y ago
  Few years? Last time I had to install Infinality patchset was about 10 years ago. Font rendering on Archlinux has been looking great for years now.
jrrrr 6y ago
I was thrown by this, too, hoping to read about rasterization.

pantulis 6y ago

If a correctly remember the consensus was that font rendering is even better in Windows?

ladyanita22 6y ago
There's no consensus. Cleartype is the most advanced technology out there AFAIK, because it considers many things macOS' font rendering method does ignore. However, the end result is that fonts get distorded heavily, whereas other OS such as macOS, iOS, Linux and Android do respect the fonts' original shape.
- chrismorgan 6y ago
  macOS does its own peculiar brand of glyph dilation. A couple of links about this: https://twitter.com/pcwalton/status/918991457532354560 https://twitter.com/pcwalton/status/918991457532354560, https://twitter.com/pcwalton/status/918593367914803201 https://twitter.com/pcwalton/status/918593367914803201. I would count this as heavy distortion, far heavier than anything any other platform may do.
- snazz 6y ago
  Here's my (somewhat oversimplified) take: - macOS uses no sub pixel hinting since High Sierra. Instead, it's just grayscale antialiasing. To make up for the unnatural thinness that occurs when grayscale antialiasing is used, fonts are artificially bolded by a small amount. - Linux/FreeType uses very nice-looking sub pixel hinting and maintains the clarity of fonts pretty well. The spacing between characters may not be pixel-perfect, if I remember correctly. - Windows/ClearType snaps fonts to the pixel grid very aggressively, resulting in some amount of distortion. Many of the default Windows fonts look really good with ClearType, while others appear strange, especially at smaller sizes. In terms of technology, ClearType is the most advanced.
  - baybal2 6y ago
    > The spacing between characters may not be pixel-perfect, if I remember correctly. Behdad has since axed usage of hints from True/OpenType fonts. Though the rationality of "more precise positioning" is kind of irrelevant on modern HiDPI screens.

SamuelAdams 6y ago

Why don't people just grab the San Francisco fonts off GitHub? [1]: https://github.com/search?q=san+francisco+font https://github.com/search?q=san+francisco+font

tiffanyh 6y ago
Apple’s license I don’t believe grants you those rights. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/32178464/is-possible-to-use-san-francisco-font-on-website-free https://stackoverflow.com/questions/32178464/is-possible-to-...
- duhi88 6y ago
  You can use it on your own computer, you just can't publish content with it that isn't iOS-related. They're not going to come knock on your door because you've set SF to be your system font.
jfk13 6y ago
Some people prefer to respect copyright.
bzb5 6y ago
The result would be the San Francisco font... rendered terribly.
- aswinmohanme 6y ago
  Yes, I have tried SanFransisco and the results were terrible. Also I didn't want to look at information rendered by a stolen font.
  - bzb5 6y ago
    Digital information cannot be stolen.
    - Shared404 6y ago

javier10e6 6y ago

Papyrus...https://youtu.be/jVhlJNJopOQ https://youtu.be/jVhlJNJopOQ

badwolf 6y ago
That's amazing. Thank you for bringing a hearty chuckle to my morning coffee.

xenonite 6y ago

I still don't understand how the removal of subpixel rendering in macOS 10.14 is not yet reversed. I can visually relax much more when I work on my 10.11 El Capitan systems.

TehCorwiz 6y ago
As screens gain resolution pixels get smaller. At some point there's a trade-off between computation power and effect. At some point sub-pixel rendering is indistinguishable from pure integer pixel rendering to the human eye on higher-resolution screens. 100% speculation: Apple has a history of very narrowly supporting only their latest few generations of equipment. It's possible that they're ignoring "legacy" devices in these decisions with the justification probably being that "They'll buy a new one eventually anyway." Edit: added missing words.
- tambourine_man 6y ago
  >Apple has a history of very narrowly supporting only their latest few generations of equipment. It has no such history, quite the opposite. You can install the latest OS on 5 year old phones and 8 year old Macs.
  - danhor 6y ago
    I mean, that's only the latest few generations. Android is worse for sure, but Windows does seem to support old PCs as long as the specs aren't as so bad as to be beaten by an older raspberry pi.
    - tambourine_man 6y ago
      > I mean, that's only the latest few generations. What do you mean by few? Apple releases new phones every single year and has for the past 12. 5 years means 5 generations.
crazygringo 6y ago
Because 1) the Mac world has moved onto high-DPI screens mainly, 2) subpixel rendering provides virtually no benefit on high-DPI screens, and 3) subpixel rendering adds a ton of complications across the board (you can't scale anything, for starters), and was always hacky to begin with -- e.g. taking a screenshot and putting it on the internet gives it a rainbow halo effect on everyone else's screen Honestly, these days with graphics cards that support Retina, the "right" way to do subpixel rendering on non-Retina screens wouldn't be with fonts at all. It would be to render everything internally normally at 3x resolution (3x horizontal by 1x vertical), and then apply subpixel rendering to the whole screen when downscaling for display. But with so few non-Retina screens being used by Mac users, why bother?

isoprophlex 6y ago

I don't care much about the fonts, i guess I'm the person who doesn't care about typography. i want my linux mouse pointer to behave as under macos. I can't quite put my finger on it, but somehow on Linux (Mint cinnamon) the pointer always ends up in a place just slightly off from where I expect it to be. Also the movement feels jerky...

xthetrfd 6y ago
Well if you find it let me know. Also normal wheel scrolling
- isoprophlex 6y ago
  I've thrown away half a day trying to figure out how to get the scroll wheel to behave. No cigar. It still scrolls one line at a time in a terminal, and two pages at a time in firefox.
  - bleepblorp 6y ago
    Try severely reducing the value of mousewheel.default.delta_multiplier_y in your Firefox about:config.
    - isoprophlex 6y ago
      Thanks! Never realised there could be a per-program setting to fiddle with!
      - bleepblorp 6y ago
        Most programs don't have internal settings for this, but Firefox does things its own way--and tends to break regularly because of it. Also try reducing mousewheel.min_line_scroll_amount if changing the other setting doesn't help. Try a value of 16.
    - jdalgetty 6y ago

jamil7 6y ago

Ah I went through this, then trying to get the trackpad to work as nicely as macOS and then trying to get universal shortcuts that work nicely across the whole system... and then realised I'd created a crappier version of macOS inside Linux and switched back. Edit: just to clarify I'm not bashing Linux, more my usecase.

jeroenhd 6y ago
There's a project working on exactly that, improved trackpad designs. Support varies between trackpads, but from what I've seen there's a lot of progress in this area. As far as I know, shortcuts are already pretty much global. Keyboard navigation, copy/paste, open/close/save, it all pretty much follows the same Windows standards. It takes time to learn to use all the shortcuts though, and a lot of them aren't intuitive. I've had the same experience when I tried macOS, none of the shortcuts made sense and behaviour was often non-intuitive coming from a non-Apple platform. If you're happy with macOS you should totally stick with macOS, but luckily there's people working hard on solving the most glaring issues with modern UIs. Once trackpad support improves, a lot of people might feel a lot better at home than they do right now.
- jamil7 6y ago
  I've actually seen the trackpad project which is really cool. The issue I had with shortcuts was finding consistency across different software, the basics but also all the text manipulation shortcuts that exist globally on macOS, it felt as though everytime I downloaded something new I needed to set it up again. It's quite possible I hadn't configured everything correctly though.
- kohtatsu 6y ago
  Command+, to bring up preferences is surefire, does linux/windows have the same yet? I remember Command+W not working as consistently as well. Word and like jumps in Windows also felt backwards to me, doing the equivalent of w instead of e in vim, and couldn't be consistently combined with shift. Support for Alt+Dpad(+Shift) and Command+Dpad(+Shift) is important IMO. As well as Double/Triple-click+Drag: it should select additional units not letters. These last paragraphs are OS-level but the features were missing or inconsistent.

abrowne 6y ago

Personally all my Linux machines use Adobe Source Sans as the default font, but Inter would be my replacement for San Francisco. https://rsms.me/inter/ https://rsms.me/inter/

supernintendo 6y ago
+1 for Inter. I’ve been using it as my system font on KDE for years and it renders really well at every display resolution I’ve tried. I’m picky about my OS fonts too.
robsalasco 6y ago
nice font! what are you using as terminal font?
- abrowne 6y ago
  I use Adobe Source Sans and Source Code. With Inter, I'd probably use Hack, an update on the great DejaVu Mono which was also the source of Apple's Menlo, their previous default. It shares some features with Inter like a single-story g.
- approxim8ion 6y ago
  I use JetBrains Mono now but I've also used Source Code Pro before. Really good fonts.

baybal2 6y ago

> <edit mode="assign" name="hintstyle"><const>hintslight</const></edit> Nor GTK, nor Qt do support "full" hinting as of few recent releases. Pango, and Harfbuzz sacrificed that ability in exchange for subpixel letter positioning.

winter_blue 6y ago

The way Arial (or "sans serif" in general) renders by default on Linux has always irked me. It's got annoying proportions, and just seems off. What really sucks is that websites like Wikipedia use it, and you have to suffer reading this horrible font. I'm super-thankful for this post. I'm definitely going to try this out. Thank you again!

tmcb 6y ago

Back when I was a Linux user, I used to do almost the same thing. With regards to the fonts, though, I preferred the URW Nimbus familiy[1], which I found by accident on a pre-installed Debian package. I have also experimented with the GNU FreeFont family[2], although I recommend the former. [1] https://www.urwtype.com/en/shop/?fontshop=datei%3Asearch_db%3Bsearchstring%3ANimbus https://www.urwtype.com/en/shop/?fontshop=datei%3Asearch_db%... --- Sorry I couldn't find a better link. [2] https://www.gnu.org/software/freefont/ https://www.gnu.org/software/freefont/

aswinmohanme 6y ago
I really like the Nimbus family and it was my goto Interface font before TeX Gyre came along. Also loved the FreeFont family, it was what I used before Nimbus.

varbhat 6y ago

To tweak font settings , see https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/fonts https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/fonts I currently use https://github.com/belluzj/fantasque-sans https://github.com/belluzj/fantasque-sans for Monspaced Font. For everything else, I use Noto Sans. Looks Well.

noisy_boy 6y ago
Fantasque-sans used to be my favorite for monospaced font - still like it a lot. Now a days, I use Fira Code which also looks quite good.

butz 6y ago

Here's how to install more default font replacements on Fedora: https://github.com/silenc3r/fedora-better-fonts https://github.com/silenc3r/fedora-better-fonts Would be great if Linux distributions provided similar expanded font setup out of the box.

megous 6y ago

It's hard to go back to scalable fonts after getting used to absolutely crisp bitmap font in my text editor on Linux. I don't care about the font shape, but the difference in sharpness on regular screens is so startling.

swebs 6y ago

Eh, I don't get it. When looking at the before and after screenshots of Wikipedia, I greatly prefer the "before" fonts. It looks easier to read and less squished. Though they both suffer from the much bigger problem where the lower case L is indistinguishable from the capital i.

fanatic2pope 6y ago
I was going to make the same point that this only really makes sense if you are used to the way that Mac OS renders fonts. I switched back to Linux a couple of years ago and this is one reason why at this point I just couldn't go back.
kijin 6y ago
Back when flat-panel displays first became mainstream, Microsoft and Apple took different directions as to how to utilize subpixel rendering. Microsoft chose to align strokes as close as possible to pixel boundaries for a sharp, crisp look even if it meant distorting the shape of the glyphs. Apple on the other hand decided to render fonts as close as possible to their original shapes even if it caused some blurriness around pixel boundaries. Linux made its own flavor of both options, and left it to the user to decide which one they wanted. The default on many distros is closer to the Windows look, though. So if you are used to the Windows look, you will probably prefer the default option than the tweaked-to-look-like-Mac option.

DictumMortuum 6y ago

I'm more of a fira sans / fira code guy. However, setting up the fonts that you want on linux can be a bit tricky and I've lost many hours trying to get a config that does it for me, so good job for the guidance that you provide.

bachmeier 6y ago

> Either you love gorgeous typography or just don’t care. If you are the former read ahead on how to make the font rendering on your Linux look just as awesome as that on macOS, else read on to find out what beauty you have been missing. Not an impressive way to start. I do not like the fonts on MacOS at all. IMO Mac fonts are the worst of all the major OSes. Windows, Linux, and ChromeOS are all better than the atrocity that is Mac fonts. Of course, that is because I use those other OSes more than MacOS, so they're the basis for me to decide what is "correct".

duhi88 6y ago
Obviously this just comes down to personal preference. All the major companies have poured lots of money into engineering typefaces specifically for their UI and brand. They're all designed to be easy to read and give off just enough personality to not be distracting. Objectively, I'd be surprised if one were better than another. I like some of the open source sans serif fonts just as much as Apple's SF fonts. Google's Roboto has a bit too much personality IMO, but it might be better tuned for Android than the web.

suhail 6y ago

Why not use Roboto which is shockingly similar?

pier25 6y ago

After using hiDPI monitors for years (Mac, Windows, Android, iOS) both examples look horrible to me.

g42gregory 6y ago

Is there any way to make Ubuntu web browser (any) rendering closer to MacOS? When I browse the Web on my MacBook Pro, it’s really pleasing to the eye. When I do the same on Ubuntu,- not so much. Is there any way to fix it?

asix66 6y ago

If you want to make this configuration local for your login (user) only, put the xml config into: $HOME/.config/fontconfig/fonts.conf Rather than the global one in /etc/fonts Reference: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Font_configuration#Fontconfig_configuration https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Font_configuration#Font...

29athrowaway 6y ago

Some ways this article could be improved: - /et/... should be /etc/... - not assuming your editor is neovim. - not assuming those fonts are installed. Some people like the font hinting and antialiasing in macOS. I don't. Fonts get really thick and hard to read. Retina mode makes fonts vastly more readable but it requires a $1000+ Apple monitor. On Linux I can plug a $300 monitor, switch resolution to 4k, set display scaling to 2x and save myself $700+.

clircle 6y ago

One of the top three reasons I use Ubuntu: no fiddling with fonts. They look good out of the box. There's enough things to fiddle with on linux.