I know, I didn't mean to imply sharpness is the only factor. It's just one of several important factors. But I couldn't care less about the font being deformed

I know, I didn't mean to imply sharpness is the only factor. It's just one of several important factors. But I couldn't care less about the font being deformed, as long as it looked better than it used to. The fact that you seem to care so much about the deformation into a different font seems to imply to me that your goal is to preserve the original font, rather than to make it look nice on the screen. If you have the time, would you mind taking the pictures in the comment below and making a smaller bitmap that shows exactly which character(s) you think are not kerned well, and which Linux or Mac kerns better? I'm really curious what I'm not seeing.