this post was submitted on 05 May 2024

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text clarity on windows is so good, can I get the same on linux? (lemdro.id)

submitted 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I tried different font settings in the font settings and it didn't improve much (font hinting, anti aliasing, custom DPI settings, different font size)

The font is the default one which is Ubuntu Regular with font size set to 10

Sub pixel order is set properly to RGB Linux Mint xfce

Even when running windows in a virtual machine, the font rendering in it is miles ahead of what I got on my Linux setup!!!

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[–] [email protected] 51 points 8 months ago (7 children)

You will never get the same font rendering on Linux as on Windows as Windows font rendering (ClearType) is very strange, complicated and covered by patents.

Font rendering is also kind of a subjective thing. To anyone who is used macOS, windows font rendering looks wrong as well. Apple's font rendering renders fonts much closer to how they would look printed out. Windows tries to increase readability by reducing blurriness and aligning everything perfectly with pixels, but it does this at the expense of accuracy.

Linux's font rendering tends to be a bit behind, but is likely to be more similar to macOS than to Windows rendering as time goes forward. The fonts themselves are often made available by Microsoft for using on different systems, it's just the rendering that is different.

For me, on my screens just by installing Segoe UI and tweaking the hinting / antialiasing under GNOME settings makes it really close to what Windows delivers. The default Ubuntu font, Cantarell and Sans don't seem to be very good fonts for a great rendering experience.

The following links may be of interest to you:

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 8 months ago (3 children)

Look into ArchWiki "font configuration" > hinting, you seem to have issues.

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 8 months ago

There are some tips here that might help

https://github.com/dajeed/arch-linux-font-improvement-guide

Important to note that restarting or running sudo fc-cache -fv is key when doing things with fonts.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 8 months ago (1 children)

This is almost always a compositor issue, and unless something is terribly wrong, only affects certain applications that don't properly use the composite rendering method. First, find out which compositor you're in (probably Wayland if a modern distro), then find out which apps seem blurry. Last step: force those apps to use your specific compositor (start searching for runtime options for the app).

Should fix it.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago (3 children)

I'm running linux mint xfce which after checking it seems that it uses xfwm 4.18.0 and everything is blury, there isn't a single thing that isn't blury well except for the windows 10 vm lol

[–] [email protected] 5 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

Did you turn off any fancy UI tweaks like scaling (especially fractional)? Have you confirmed if your session has a compositor running?

Also, try something like this

Depending on your overall OS and sessions setup, your distro install may not be tweaked properly for Xfce, which still doesn't have Wayland support last I checked. So unless you made sure to clear out all the other global configs that could impact the GUI session, you'll probably have some issues unless you switch to an Xfce catered distro.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago (1 children)

i use mint on my nvidia gpu with latest drivers and i have no problem

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (4 children)

Maybe because of the old Nvidia gpu, hmm will try the OS drivers hope it helps,

Update: didn't help but it did fix an issue with the flatpak version of telegram (openGL) and wine is no longer complaining about something that's broken with the proprietary driver + the boot and shutdown animation now actually runs (which is Linux mint logo)

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago (1 children)

I have a similar issue but in my case between KDE and Gnome. KDE is much cleaner by display the fonts as Gnome. But I prefer using Gnome, because of the cluttered interface of most KDE applications.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago (2 children)

I just tried a live Lubunto install, and it too looks blurry running the OS GPU drivers

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

Are your video card and monitor working properly on linux? You getting the resolution you should?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago (9 children)

Very old Toshiba laptop with a very old Nvidia gpu GT 525M running proprietary drivers connected to a 1080p monitor and yes it is running at 1080p

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