Note that just updating Cairo will not automatically bring subpixel positioning to Gtk. Pango still defaults to rounding glyph positions to full pixels (rightly

Note that just updating Cairo will not automatically bring subpixel positioning to Gtk. Pango still defaults to rounding glyph positions to full pixels (rightly so, as there's no released version of Cairo that would render it correctly otherwise), and there's absolutely no code in Gtk that would allow disabling this rounding. I reminded Matthias about this half a year ago: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/7#note_795665 https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/7#note_795665 but it still hasn't been resolved (the issue is marked as closed but that, I believe, is a mistake). I suspect they're not going to enable this in Gtk until Cairo with support for subpixel positioning is released. Anyway, I've manually built a snapshot of Cairo for Debian: https://salsa.debian.org/liskin/cairo/-/commits/debian/master https://salsa.debian.org/liskin/cairo/-/commits/debian/maste... and I have a wrapper around Pango which enables subpixel positioning: https://github.com/liskin/dotfiles/tree/79cef7167a57dde02edf97e35286dc45b1262497/src/pango-force-subpixel-positioning https://github.com/liskin/dotfiles/tree/79cef7167a57dde02edf.... It really it noticeably prettier! :-)