7 ms·

macOS Like Fonts on Manjaro/Arch Linux

50 points by sys42590 3y ago

dmix 3y ago
Seems to be pretty heavy on the anti-aliasing compared to macOS. Wikipedia results on macOS Chrome https://i.imgur.com/uE6BZ3g.png https://i.imgur.com/uE6BZ3g.png
raggi 3y ago
Configuring presentable fonts for the nth time was the thing that tipped me over the edge years ago to promise to myself that I will never again make another Linux desktop configuration until I see one that _out of the box_ provides a not-obviously-buggy presentation for every app that I use daily. Since then I have yet to see an environment meet that bar, and have wasted no more time configuring X, fonts, compositors, themes, key binds, etc. I look forward to this changing one day, but I'm not expecting it soon. The ecosystem moves between technical targets too often to reach sufficient polish to meet the bar.
- pmarreck 3y ago
  NixOS lets you configure them once, forever.
  - Apreche 3y ago
    That's once too many.
    - e12e 3y ago
      It's the same number of times you need to configure scaling in macOS though?
      - moondev 3y ago
        Nope. They said out of the box. So it's "looks like 1920x1080" with a massive dock. Pure and intuitive as intended.
      - chaorace 3y ago
        Welcome to HN: where NixOS is evangelized with the thunderous battlecry of "People who hate configuring love configuring NixOS! If you hate configuring too, you should stop using that system you've already finished configuring and then learn to configure this new one!"
  - therein 3y ago
    It's not like NixOS never had any breaking changes. It was my mainly driver for a few years and I remember at least a few announcements of breaking changes.
- moondev 3y ago
  Using a scaled resolution may affect performance.
- e12e 3y ago
  When was this? Did you try Ubuntu 18.04 or later lts? Curious what was wrong with Wayland/Gnome and fonts. I generally replace the monospace/console font - but i do that on MacOS and windows too. Tbh I find the lack of decent (tiled) wm (as well as broken display on "low-res" (1440p/QHD) external displays) on MacOS much more frustrating. I make do with yabai, but the hoops one needs to jump through and the resulting fragile setup isn't great. Hm, now i came across this - so maybe there's a decent fix for that too? https://www.theregister.com/2021/12/03/apple_m1_drivers/ https://www.theregister.com/2021/12/03/apple_m1_drivers/ https://github.com/waydabber/BetterDisplay https://github.com/waydabber/BetterDisplay
  - kitsunesoba 3y ago
    > broken display on "low-res" (1440p/QHD) external displays Curious as to what's being referred to here. I've used 27" 2560x1440 displays with macOS for a long time, both with Intel and M-series Macs.
    - maleldil 3y ago
      IME, 1440p at 27" looks really bad if you're used to 4K at 150% (effectively 1440p). I had to buy a new monitor and went with a 1440p to save money, but returned it and got the 4K. It's significantly better.
    - gnosek 3y ago
      I used external FHD displays and the result was a blurry mess with obvious fractional scaling applied (nothing was aligned to pixel boundaries)
    - e12e 3y ago
      The register link goes into more detail - basically Apple dropped (or never had?) fractional scaling. So for an m2 Mac the external display and internal display will look different (unlike, say with Linux/Wayland - or with an apple hidpi external display).
      - dandongus 3y ago
- 5e92cb50239222b 3y ago
  I have to wonder why you're expecting the same level of polish from an operating system (a bunch of them actually) that have to support thousands of different configurations made by third-party vendors, as from a proprietary operating system from the same vendor that makes the hardware for it (with an extremely limited set of configurations). The reason you seem to prefer macOS and Apple is the very same reason I tend stay as far away from it as possible.
- soraminazuki 3y ago
  You’re asking for the impossible. When it comes to fonts, no single configuration would ever make everyone happy. Look at the screenshots for the out of the box appearance on Manjaro. I don’t see anything wrong with it compared to macOS. Yet, here we are. Making a font change to an open source project is a good way to attract angry replies in issue trackers if you’re not careful. The Perfect Configuration (TM) simply doesn’t exist.
  - raggi 3y ago
    Oh I agree that font and weight selection are entirely preferential. In both of these images you can clearly see bad color bleed in the title bar font, and in the content font in the after case. I'm guessing the users main concern is that they want a higher text density which the after shot demonstrates. IMO both of these cases can be improved substantially to remove the color faults using grayscale subpixel rather than this colorful mess. RGB subpixel has not looked good on any screen I've used in what about 10 years? The shapes of displays no longer produces good results with these techniques. Why? Take a picture of your screen from close up with a modern phone and zoom in. You may see a non-RGB layout, but even if you don't you'll almost certainly observe a pattern where the empty space is significantly vertically larger around one boundary (often red/blue), this is related to the brightness targets monitors have been hitting for so long. As the pixels no longer align with the theoretical shape, if you can see the colors, the colors often look super trashy.
kitsunesoba 3y ago
Nice guide, I hadn't seen the trick with matching and replacing specific fonts (e.g. -apple-system). One thing I'd tweak for my own usage though is to use Inter[0] in place of TeX Gyre Heros for the sans-serif font. Inter, as its name suggests, is designed specifically for usage as a screen/UI font and has metrics extremely similar to those of San Francisco, which is the font that Apple has been using for its UIs for several years now. Inter also has broad language support with a wider variety of weights, so there's practically no situation in which it comes up lacking. [0]: https://rsms.me/inter/ https://rsms.me/inter/
- Terretta 3y ago
  This is a remarkably beautiful font for free. Wasn't aware of the Figma-related heritage, but real-world dog-fooding use helps explain the professionalism.
pmarreck 3y ago
site is now inaccessible
elromulous 3y ago
Did we hug it to death, or did apple issue a c&d?
- cmiller1 3y ago
  Here it is on archive.org https://web.archive.org/web/20230531183821/https://aswinmohan.me/better-fonts-on-linux https://web.archive.org/web/20230531183821/https://aswinmoha...
NayamAmarshe 3y ago
Am I the only one who doesn't get what the fuss is about? I use macOS, I use Linux, I don't have a problem with the fonts. In my opinion they all look great. I'd say this though, macOS fonts generally look worse and too thick on a 1080p display.
- nullindividual 3y ago
  macOS isn't designed to run on non-HiDpi displays, like 1080p.
  - kitsunesoba 3y ago
    I find the cutoff to sit around where 2560x1440 on 27" is. Anything lower has always looked less than great under macOS and has looked bad ever since they disabled RGB subpixel AA by default.
    - caseyohara 3y ago
      2560x1440 on 27" is only 109 PPI, which still isn't great for the viewing distance of desk work. Most recent MacBooks are in the range of 225-255 PPI. A 27" 5K is 218 PPI, which is the minimum pixel density for desk work, IMO.
      - kitsunesoba 3y ago
        Around 218 PPI is what I prefer too, but desktop displays with that pixel density are unfortunately expensive and uncommon. Only nearly a decade after Apple released 5k iMacs are similar monitors starting to become more available.
      - TacticalCoder 3y ago
        > A 27" 5K is 218 PPI, which is the minimum pixel density for desk work, IMO. I completely disagree with that. 110 dpi is totally fine for desk work. Always has been and will probably continue to be for a really long time. I take my 38" doing 3840x1600 at 110 DPI over a 27"K (or even two) doing 218 DPI any day. Now if you do photography or work on designing bills (as in money), then you'll want higher DPI. But for "desk work", there's zero need for anything more than 110 DPI. It may be "nice" to have retina fonts but it's by not a requirement. I'd even say the real world is powered by something like 95%+ of people doing "desk work" on 110 DPI (or less) screen. Also, if 5K / 218 PPI is the "minimum pixel density" for desk work, what's the minimum density for creatives?
BearOso 3y ago
The only difference in the smaller screenshots is the change from either full or medium to slight hinting, which can be done in the font settings of any desktop environment. Something else to note: Chrome/Chromium does its own font rasterization using Skia, and it tends to not abide by font settings.
iamdbtoo 3y ago
I have a somewhat similar configuration, but I use the actual Apple fonts instead of alternatives with fallbacks. https://developer.apple.com/fonts/ https://developer.apple.com/fonts/
prima-facie 3y ago
I can't stand RGBA fringing on text, it gets tiring very quickly despite making the fonts look better. This font config is what I've been using for ages: https://gist.github.com/radupotop/acec155e01a3b5c7ec9beff10068462c https://gist.github.com/radupotop/acec155e01a3b5c7ec9beff100... Basically it boils down to: rgba=none, hinting=true, hintstyle=hintslight, antialias=true, with a few font replacement directives. Having a High-DPI screen obviously helps. I found that 27 inch monitors with UHD resolutions to provide a good density at around 163 PPI.
- BearOso 3y ago
  If you have glasses you're probably experiencing chromatic aberration. Not much can be done about that other than doing what you're doing and using a high-dpi display. It's worse with extended color gamut monitors. sRGB is necessary for the color weights to be properly balanced.
caycep 3y ago
would it be more in the vein of open source/DIY linux where it comes with minimal fonts and you install the ones you buy from say Hoeffler & co etc?
b215826 3y ago
<edit name="autohint" mode="assign"> <bool>true</bool> </edit> <edit name="hinting" mode="assign"> <bool>true</bool> </edit> <edit mode="assign" name="hintstyle"> <const>hintslight</const> </edit> I thought macOS did very little font hinting? I personally turn off hinting in my fonts.conf. Also, TeX Gyre Heros isn't identical to Helvetica Neue, which itself is not hard to find on the Internet.
- bscphil 3y ago
  Yes, this post is nonsense. The biggest issue is that macOS doesn't do sub-pixel anti-aliasing and hasn't for many years: the "after" picture looks nothing at all like macOS! You'd achieve macOS style rendering on Linux by: * disabling hinting completely (don't forget the auto hinter) * disable subpixel anti-aliasing (use only grayscale full pixel anti-aliasing) Then you need to find a way to enable sub-pixel positioning (which uses anti-aliasing to offset glyphs by fractions of a pixel). If your applications are all QT5/6 or GTK4, you're done, because this is enabled by default. Applications that use other text drawing methods (including GTK2/3 but probably others) may need additional adjustment. I think the only sure-fire way of doing it would be to patch Pango / Cairo. Personally, I do most of the above but leave sub-pixel anti-aliasing enabled, because it works better on my low-DPI monitor. The advice given on the page is outright wrong for a few reasons: * it doesn't mention sub-pixel anti-aliasing at all (and leaves it enabled!) * the before picture appears to have less hinting than the after picture, and therefore more macOS like (??) * it doesn't mention sub-pixel positioning at all
hbogert 3y ago
> 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. It's probably me, but font rendering sucks on macos. The out-of-the-box experience on external screens which are not hidpi is worse than windows XP. I needed all kinds of small tools and the commandline to make MacOS not do a terrible job. The macos forums have loads of complaints about this, of course almost all are answered with: "well, you got used to hi-dpi on your mac, that's how bad it looks on low-dpi screens, you should buy an thunderbolt/5k screen". Btw, this used to be fine when i used MacOSX in ca 2012-2015. The subpixel hinting has explicitly been disabled since Mac mojave [1] In short, the MacOS envy is highly misplaced. [1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/8wpk18/macos_mojave_nukes_subpixel_antialiasing_making/ https://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/8wpk18/macos_mojave_...
- massysett 3y ago
  It's so bad that I gave up on using an old Macbook Pro with an external monitor. I use a cheap old Windows PC instead, which suffices for this particular use.
- musicale 3y ago
  Whenever I use macOS with a non-HiDPI display I miss the old subpixel rendering. And I also wish Terminal (not to mention XQuartz) rendered bitmap fonts properly (sharply) with antialiasing disabled. iTerm2 does it correctly, but it's sluggish compared to Terminal. Fortunately I use HiDPI 99.9% of the time. But I still wish they'd fix bitmap font rendering.
RadiozRadioz 3y ago
Why, oh why, are the before/after images cropped differently? The wiki page has a completely different scroll position! I want to actually use the images to compare the font rendering. I would also like to see a screenshot of MacOS to show the target look the author is going for. I re-cropped the images myself, here's a link: https://imgur.com/a/KBljy6S https://imgur.com/a/KBljy6S

50 points by sys42590 3y ago

dmix 3y ago

Seems to be pretty heavy on the anti-aliasing compared to macOS. Wikipedia results on macOS Chrome https://i.imgur.com/uE6BZ3g.png https://i.imgur.com/uE6BZ3g.png

raggi 3y ago

Configuring presentable fonts for the nth time was the thing that tipped me over the edge years ago to promise to myself that I will never again make another Linux desktop configuration until I see one that _out of the box_ provides a not-obviously-buggy presentation for every app that I use daily. Since then I have yet to see an environment meet that bar, and have wasted no more time configuring X, fonts, compositors, themes, key binds, etc. I look forward to this changing one day, but I'm not expecting it soon. The ecosystem moves between technical targets too often to reach sufficient polish to meet the bar.

pmarreck 3y ago
NixOS lets you configure them once, forever.
- Apreche 3y ago
  That's once too many.
  - e12e 3y ago
    It's the same number of times you need to configure scaling in macOS though?
    - moondev 3y ago
      Nope. They said out of the box. So it's "looks like 1920x1080" with a massive dock. Pure and intuitive as intended.
    - chaorace 3y ago
      Welcome to HN: where NixOS is evangelized with the thunderous battlecry of "People who hate configuring love configuring NixOS! If you hate configuring too, you should stop using that system you've already finished configuring and then learn to configure this new one!"
- therein 3y ago
  It's not like NixOS never had any breaking changes. It was my mainly driver for a few years and I remember at least a few announcements of breaking changes.
moondev 3y ago
Using a scaled resolution may affect performance.
e12e 3y ago
When was this? Did you try Ubuntu 18.04 or later lts? Curious what was wrong with Wayland/Gnome and fonts. I generally replace the monospace/console font - but i do that on MacOS and windows too. Tbh I find the lack of decent (tiled) wm (as well as broken display on "low-res" (1440p/QHD) external displays) on MacOS much more frustrating. I make do with yabai, but the hoops one needs to jump through and the resulting fragile setup isn't great. Hm, now i came across this - so maybe there's a decent fix for that too? https://www.theregister.com/2021/12/03/apple_m1_drivers/ https://www.theregister.com/2021/12/03/apple_m1_drivers/ https://github.com/waydabber/BetterDisplay https://github.com/waydabber/BetterDisplay
- kitsunesoba 3y ago
  > broken display on "low-res" (1440p/QHD) external displays Curious as to what's being referred to here. I've used 27" 2560x1440 displays with macOS for a long time, both with Intel and M-series Macs.
  - maleldil 3y ago
    IME, 1440p at 27" looks really bad if you're used to 4K at 150% (effectively 1440p). I had to buy a new monitor and went with a 1440p to save money, but returned it and got the 4K. It's significantly better.
  - gnosek 3y ago
    I used external FHD displays and the result was a blurry mess with obvious fractional scaling applied (nothing was aligned to pixel boundaries)
  - e12e 3y ago
    The register link goes into more detail - basically Apple dropped (or never had?) fractional scaling. So for an m2 Mac the external display and internal display will look different (unlike, say with Linux/Wayland - or with an apple hidpi external display).
    - dandongus 3y ago
5e92cb50239222b 3y ago
I have to wonder why you're expecting the same level of polish from an operating system (a bunch of them actually) that have to support thousands of different configurations made by third-party vendors, as from a proprietary operating system from the same vendor that makes the hardware for it (with an extremely limited set of configurations). The reason you seem to prefer macOS and Apple is the very same reason I tend stay as far away from it as possible.
soraminazuki 3y ago
You’re asking for the impossible. When it comes to fonts, no single configuration would ever make everyone happy. Look at the screenshots for the out of the box appearance on Manjaro. I don’t see anything wrong with it compared to macOS. Yet, here we are. Making a font change to an open source project is a good way to attract angry replies in issue trackers if you’re not careful. The Perfect Configuration (TM) simply doesn’t exist.
- raggi 3y ago
  Oh I agree that font and weight selection are entirely preferential. In both of these images you can clearly see bad color bleed in the title bar font, and in the content font in the after case. I'm guessing the users main concern is that they want a higher text density which the after shot demonstrates. IMO both of these cases can be improved substantially to remove the color faults using grayscale subpixel rather than this colorful mess. RGB subpixel has not looked good on any screen I've used in what about 10 years? The shapes of displays no longer produces good results with these techniques. Why? Take a picture of your screen from close up with a modern phone and zoom in. You may see a non-RGB layout, but even if you don't you'll almost certainly observe a pattern where the empty space is significantly vertically larger around one boundary (often red/blue), this is related to the brightness targets monitors have been hitting for so long. As the pixels no longer align with the theoretical shape, if you can see the colors, the colors often look super trashy.

kitsunesoba 3y ago

Nice guide, I hadn't seen the trick with matching and replacing specific fonts (e.g. -apple-system). One thing I'd tweak for my own usage though is to use Inter[0] in place of TeX Gyre Heros for the sans-serif font. Inter, as its name suggests, is designed specifically for usage as a screen/UI font and has metrics extremely similar to those of San Francisco, which is the font that Apple has been using for its UIs for several years now. Inter also has broad language support with a wider variety of weights, so there's practically no situation in which it comes up lacking. [0]: https://rsms.me/inter/ https://rsms.me/inter/

Terretta 3y ago
This is a remarkably beautiful font for free. Wasn't aware of the Figma-related heritage, but real-world dog-fooding use helps explain the professionalism.

pmarreck 3y ago

site is now inaccessible

elromulous 3y ago

Did we hug it to death, or did apple issue a c&d?

cmiller1 3y ago
Here it is on archive.org https://web.archive.org/web/20230531183821/https://aswinmohan.me/better-fonts-on-linux https://web.archive.org/web/20230531183821/https://aswinmoha...

NayamAmarshe 3y ago

Am I the only one who doesn't get what the fuss is about? I use macOS, I use Linux, I don't have a problem with the fonts. In my opinion they all look great. I'd say this though, macOS fonts generally look worse and too thick on a 1080p display.

nullindividual 3y ago
macOS isn't designed to run on non-HiDpi displays, like 1080p.
- kitsunesoba 3y ago
  I find the cutoff to sit around where 2560x1440 on 27" is. Anything lower has always looked less than great under macOS and has looked bad ever since they disabled RGB subpixel AA by default.
  - caseyohara 3y ago
    2560x1440 on 27" is only 109 PPI, which still isn't great for the viewing distance of desk work. Most recent MacBooks are in the range of 225-255 PPI. A 27" 5K is 218 PPI, which is the minimum pixel density for desk work, IMO.
    - kitsunesoba 3y ago
      Around 218 PPI is what I prefer too, but desktop displays with that pixel density are unfortunately expensive and uncommon. Only nearly a decade after Apple released 5k iMacs are similar monitors starting to become more available.
    - TacticalCoder 3y ago
      > A 27" 5K is 218 PPI, which is the minimum pixel density for desk work, IMO. I completely disagree with that. 110 dpi is totally fine for desk work. Always has been and will probably continue to be for a really long time. I take my 38" doing 3840x1600 at 110 DPI over a 27"K (or even two) doing 218 DPI any day. Now if you do photography or work on designing bills (as in money), then you'll want higher DPI. But for "desk work", there's zero need for anything more than 110 DPI. It may be "nice" to have retina fonts but it's by not a requirement. I'd even say the real world is powered by something like 95%+ of people doing "desk work" on 110 DPI (or less) screen. Also, if 5K / 218 PPI is the "minimum pixel density" for desk work, what's the minimum density for creatives?

BearOso 3y ago

The only difference in the smaller screenshots is the change from either full or medium to slight hinting, which can be done in the font settings of any desktop environment. Something else to note: Chrome/Chromium does its own font rasterization using Skia, and it tends to not abide by font settings.

iamdbtoo 3y ago

I have a somewhat similar configuration, but I use the actual Apple fonts instead of alternatives with fallbacks. https://developer.apple.com/fonts/ https://developer.apple.com/fonts/

prima-facie 3y ago

I can't stand RGBA fringing on text, it gets tiring very quickly despite making the fonts look better. This font config is what I've been using for ages: https://gist.github.com/radupotop/acec155e01a3b5c7ec9beff10068462c https://gist.github.com/radupotop/acec155e01a3b5c7ec9beff100... Basically it boils down to: rgba=none, hinting=true, hintstyle=hintslight, antialias=true, with a few font replacement directives. Having a High-DPI screen obviously helps. I found that 27 inch monitors with UHD resolutions to provide a good density at around 163 PPI.

BearOso 3y ago
If you have glasses you're probably experiencing chromatic aberration. Not much can be done about that other than doing what you're doing and using a high-dpi display. It's worse with extended color gamut monitors. sRGB is necessary for the color weights to be properly balanced.

caycep 3y ago

would it be more in the vein of open source/DIY linux where it comes with minimal fonts and you install the ones you buy from say Hoeffler & co etc?

b215826 3y ago

<edit name="autohint" mode="assign"> <bool>true</bool> </edit> <edit name="hinting" mode="assign"> <bool>true</bool> </edit> <edit mode="assign" name="hintstyle"> <const>hintslight</const> </edit> I thought macOS did very little font hinting? I personally turn off hinting in my fonts.conf. Also, TeX Gyre Heros isn't identical to Helvetica Neue, which itself is not hard to find on the Internet.

bscphil 3y ago
Yes, this post is nonsense. The biggest issue is that macOS doesn't do sub-pixel anti-aliasing and hasn't for many years: the "after" picture looks nothing at all like macOS! You'd achieve macOS style rendering on Linux by: * disabling hinting completely (don't forget the auto hinter) * disable subpixel anti-aliasing (use only grayscale full pixel anti-aliasing) Then you need to find a way to enable sub-pixel positioning (which uses anti-aliasing to offset glyphs by fractions of a pixel). If your applications are all QT5/6 or GTK4, you're done, because this is enabled by default. Applications that use other text drawing methods (including GTK2/3 but probably others) may need additional adjustment. I think the only sure-fire way of doing it would be to patch Pango / Cairo. Personally, I do most of the above but leave sub-pixel anti-aliasing enabled, because it works better on my low-DPI monitor. The advice given on the page is outright wrong for a few reasons: * it doesn't mention sub-pixel anti-aliasing at all (and leaves it enabled!) * the before picture appears to have less hinting than the after picture, and therefore more macOS like (??) * it doesn't mention sub-pixel positioning at all

hbogert 3y ago

> 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. It's probably me, but font rendering sucks on macos. The out-of-the-box experience on external screens which are not hidpi is worse than windows XP. I needed all kinds of small tools and the commandline to make MacOS not do a terrible job. The macos forums have loads of complaints about this, of course almost all are answered with: "well, you got used to hi-dpi on your mac, that's how bad it looks on low-dpi screens, you should buy an thunderbolt/5k screen". Btw, this used to be fine when i used MacOSX in ca 2012-2015. The subpixel hinting has explicitly been disabled since Mac mojave [1] In short, the MacOS envy is highly misplaced. [1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/8wpk18/macos_mojave_nukes_subpixel_antialiasing_making/ https://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/8wpk18/macos_mojave_...

massysett 3y ago
It's so bad that I gave up on using an old Macbook Pro with an external monitor. I use a cheap old Windows PC instead, which suffices for this particular use.
musicale 3y ago
Whenever I use macOS with a non-HiDPI display I miss the old subpixel rendering. And I also wish Terminal (not to mention XQuartz) rendered bitmap fonts properly (sharply) with antialiasing disabled. iTerm2 does it correctly, but it's sluggish compared to Terminal. Fortunately I use HiDPI 99.9% of the time. But I still wish they'd fix bitmap font rendering.

RadiozRadioz 3y ago

Why, oh why, are the before/after images cropped differently? The wiki page has a completely different scroll position! I want to actually use the images to compare the font rendering. I would also like to see a screenshot of MacOS to show the target look the author is going for. I re-cropped the images myself, here's a link: https://imgur.com/a/KBljy6S https://imgur.com/a/KBljy6S