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Linux still has horrible font rendering, which makes web browsing uncomfortable. It doesn't come close to Windows or Mac. Fonts often appear soapy, kerning is o
by agent008t 4y ago
Linux still has horrible font rendering, which makes web browsing uncomfortable. It doesn't come close to Windows or Mac. Fonts often appear soapy, kerning is off etc.
- Dracophoenix 4y agoFirefox lets you set local fonts in place of webfonts. The bad font rendering on desktop may not be completely ameliorated, but you can play around with some of the more well-designed font families (Noto, Adobe Source, IBM Plex) to give it a better look.
- dijit 4y agoLinux can have crappy font rendering. I can also have gorgeous font rendering. I would mess around with some live distros to see what you prefer. This is how my comment looks to me (on linux): https://i.imgur.com/wvruFyX.png https://i.imgur.com/wvruFyX.png
- sinsterizme 4y agoHmm not sure if it’s the quality of the image or the font, but that might prove his point, that looks quite bad.
- mongol 4y agoIs not subpixel rendering of fonts impossible to illustrate unless you sit down in front of the same monitor (or at least similar hardware)
- deno 4y agoYes, doesn't have to be the same monitor but it needs to have the same subpixel orientation and you need to have the same resolution or 2x resolution and scale 50% so it pixel aligns. If you look at those screenshots on a 4K display they're incredibly blurry because all you're looking at is your browser doing image scaling optimized for photographs.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- dijit 4y agoHow does it look for you?
- NoGravitas 4y agoIt's both. The image compression makes it not perfect, and it's also a monospaced font, which makes it impossible to say anything about the kerning.
- blacktulip 4y agoI hope the blurriness is because of image compression. Because if it is not, the rendering is really bad here.
- neoberg 4y agoIt looks very bad tbh. This is how my comment looks on Mac for comparison. Uploading to imgur to test if there is compression in play here. https://i.imgur.com/hSirmx6.png https://i.imgur.com/hSirmx6.png
- dijit 4y agointerestingly I much prefer mine. :\ I guess font rendering is very subjective.
- Terretta 4y agoSetting aside font selection and looking at rendering, yours is softer around the edges which may subjectively feel pleasant when looking at it as an image but is objectively worse for reading.
- unhammer 4y agohttps://i.imgur.com/ptUyCn0.png https://i.imgur.com/ptUyCn0.png another linux screenshot fwiw
- deno 4y agoYou're either using 200% scaling or browser zoom because I had to scale your image by 50% on a 4K display for it to look 100% sized. This is apples-oranges. And if you're looking at those other screenshots on a 4K display then you need to also zoom to 50% and get your eyes close the the display, otherwise you're just seeing the results of an image scaling algorithm, which will indeed look terrible. Here is Fedora/KDE/Flatpak/Firefox with default settings at 4K resolution and 100% browser zoom for comparison: https://i.imgur.com/s3ynhuj.png https://i.imgur.com/s3ynhuj.png Also with my preferred browser zoom: https://i.imgur.com/9PXDbxY.png https://i.imgur.com/9PXDbxY.png For the above images you'll need to zoom 50% on a 4K display, because PNG image files do not carry pixel density metadata. If you have 1080p display then you have to keep 100% zoom and sit far away instead.
- neoberg 4y agono I'm not using any zoom or extra scaling. It's the native scaling of mbp retina display. Screenshot is ~2 times bigger than what I actually see. edit: your second screenshot looks very sharp and nice on my display.
- donatj 4y agoThe kerning on your screenshot is very chunky. In particular look at the kerning on the lower case r’s in your screenshot. The r is given way too much horizontal space particularly to it’s right, especially so in the word “crappy”.
- skhr0680 4y agoI think it’s a monospace font, which makes the keming look bad
- account42 4y agoShouln't it be ke r n i ng instead of keming if you are talking about a monospace font.
- dijit 4y agoAH, that's because I'm using a monospace font for editing, normal pages use the normal font: https://i.imgur.com/otqaSTa.png https://i.imgur.com/otqaSTa.png
- eterm 4y agoThat looks horrible to me too, perhaps I'm used to windows but the word "comment" sticks out to me there as particularly bad.
- sph 4y agoIt's not even the right font, unless you're using custom CSS. The Hacker News stylesheet calls for "Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif", and your PC renders a serif font instead. Something's wrong with your fontconfig setup. What's your distro?
- dijit 4y agoI'm using Archlinux and/or Gentoo. Fontconfig is working fine but Verdana is a Microsoft font and Geneva is a Apple font. My font fallback for sans-serif is DejaVu Serif.
- grecy 4y agoThat honestly looks like something from a laptop in 1998. I haven't seen a screen that bad in a very long time.
- ntoskrnl 4y agoLook at the last word, "linux". In both the "n" and "u", the left stem is thin and crisp, but the right stem is thick and blurry. Maybe it doesn't bother you, but I couldn't put up with that if I were using it all day. You're right about trying different distros. Manjaro+Gnome does much better IMO: https://i.imgur.com/kiLDWzJ.png https://i.imgur.com/kiLDWzJ.png
- shawnz 4y agoThat seems pretty terrible to me, even discounting the fact that it's monospace (I use monospace for editing too). Especially notice how the letters have inconsistent thicknesses, sometimes thicker on the left vs the right or vice versa, sometimes even different thicknesses depending on where they appear in the sentence (e.g. look at the 'n')
- sph 4y agoThat screenshot is not very good at all, and I'm on Linux myself. You're just a few tweaks away from better rendering.
- dijit 4y agoWilling to be wrong of course, I suspect that what I'm seeing and what others are seeing are quite different. Perhaps there's a component of how the LCD is presenting it involved? to me my font is extremely uniform and sharp with no bleeding or blurring. What tweaks do you have? I used to run X11 and ran the gamut of x11 based font rendering tweaks (example of how my old machine looked: https://i.imgur.com/J9biJsW.png https://i.imgur.com/J9biJsW.png ) But with sway/wayland I have much less ability to change things.
- sph 4y agoThis screenshot looks better than the other of yours, but honestly I think it's more due how how antialiasing is rendered there vs in your Firefox screenshot. Additionally, for ages Linux had shipped with Full hinting, which means distorting the font so straight lines are always on integer pixel boundaries, which looks atrocious. These days distros like Fedora use Light hinting, which is a little better, and in my opinion No hinting looks best, which is what macOS does, but on a low DPI screen means having blurry font. So on low DPI screens you have the choice between distorted but clean fonts, or undistorted blurry fonts. I don't know about sway, in my case I'm using Fedora with 2x scaling, so I have the option of disabling hinting and avoiding distortion.
- windexh8er 4y agoThis may have been true in the past but I spend my day swivel-chairing between a current-gen MBP and a Debian derivative running Cinnamon. Both displays are the same and I don't find that the Mac is better. Maybe I'm less critical than others. What's interesting is the MBP handles external displays horribly with the current version of OS X. Lid closure is a crap shoot on what the device decides to do.
- TacticalCoder 4y agoIs it really as bad as you make it out to be? I've got everything at home: old non-retina MacBook Airs running OS X, a M1/retina MacBook Air running OS X, Windows (well, wife's computer) and then Linux laptops and desktops. Fonts on my main Linux "workstation" may not be as perfect as on the M1 Mac I use from the couch but it's because my 38" monitor ain't retina and it's a far cry from making "browsing uncomfortable". Yes, many of the CSS stacks (even for the big sites which really should know better) are totally broken when it comes to Linux (they don't list enough fonts that various distro will have by default, they list fonts that many distro will not have by default and unsurprisingly end up defaulting to shitty fonts) and as soon as one site started using that one CSS stack, they all started the copy/pasta. But I wouldn't go as far as saying that browsing on Linux is "uncomfortable": many people do that on a daily basis and are perfectly happy. Also not all websites have broken CSS font stacks for Linux. Some saw the light.
- Terretta 4y ago> Is it really as bad as you make it out to be? Yes. > my 38" monitor ain't retina … perfectly happy Put another way, either you are not visually discerning or your bar is lower. // Since “FHD” laptops, and monitors <4K, are still a thing, you are not alone.
- scroot 4y agoI have to agree here. Font rendering in Linux is across the board noticeably worse than macOS. I still can't quite understand why.
- TacticalCoder 4y agoAgree with what? That's not the original point. The original point was that Linux font rendering "doesn't come close to Windows or Mac". You're all shifting the goalpost. Nobody is saying that fonts on a retina display on OS X do not look better than fonts on a non-retina display on Linux. What we're disputing is that fonts rendering on Linux is so bad that it's "uncomfortable". Now we may have a discussion as to whether everybody should be using retina display or not but that'd be another topic.
- skhr0680 4y agoWhen I used Gnome3 on a HiDPI notebook fonts looked fine once I switched my interface font to a newer Helvetica and turned all of the system font smoothing feature off
- dymax78 4y agoThat's an interesting perspective. Certainly not saying you're wrong. I found the font on Windows (note: Windows 10) unbearable despite deploying a plethora of "tweaks" and "fixes", and wasn't content until I made the the switch to Linux & MAC (home and work, respectively.) edit: Noto Sans or Futura BK Book for Interface & Document, Hack Regular for Monospace.
- NoGravitas 4y agoMy experience with font rendering on Linux is that it's much better than on Windows, on comparable displays. I have fought with my Windows station at work to get acceptable font rendering for anything but the optimized-for-ClearType system fonts, but font rendering on Linux is great, and if you have different preferences, there are adequate levers to adjust it (via, e.g., GNOME Tweak Tool). (In particular, I get color banding and inconsistent weights in Windows, especially with thin fonts.)
- declnz 4y agoI disagree. Which "Linux" are you even talking about? (it's not the Kernel that's relevant here of course)