could just be a barebones install. Arch + xmonad/i3/awesome/whatever no-desktop-compositor-included-DE looks like that out of the box. Probably other distros,

could just be a barebones install. Arch + xmonad/i3/awesome/whatever no-desktop-compositor-included-DE looks like that out of the box. Probably other distros, too, but Arch has no font hinting/aa defaults either so the problem is usually exacerbated as compared to something like debian or ubuntu.