It's at least partly a matter of taste. I personally never liked the font rendering on OS X (well before retina became a thing); it just never really looked rig

It's at least partly a matter of taste. I personally never liked the font rendering on OS X (well before retina became a thing); it just never really looked right to me; too thick and too much blurriness. Looking at the screenshots in the article, I personally prefer the "before" version. On my Linux machine I use Deja Vu fonts for pretty much anything. I very intentionally don't install "Windows compatibility fonts" and the like. In my opinion it looks great, but someone else might have a different opinion. I also used the classic "Xterm fixed" fonts for a long time and thought that looked great too (I switched to DejaVu Sans Mono a long time ago, mostly for better scaling) which still has a group of dedicated "fans" today, but many would probably consider it horrendous. One thing I will say that's objectively bad is fontconfig configuration, which is quite arcane.