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 6 months ago* (last edited 6 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 6 months ago (4 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:

[–] [email protected] 13 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Definitely very subjective. People keep saying macOS has amazing font rendering but for me it just looks like a blurry mess, especially on non-retina displays. My fonts are set to be as sharp as possible on Linux because when coding and in the terminal I want very sharp fonts so they're easier to read for me.

Seconding the dependence on the particular font as well. Cantarell, Ubuntu and OpenSans are all fairly blurry regardless, unless seen on HiDPI screens in which case they do look more like macOS. DejaVu Sans can be very sharp in contrast at very low resolutions because it's been made in the 800x600 and 1024x768 days and optimized to look sharp when small.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 6 months ago (1 children)

I gotta highly disagree with the blurry mess comment. To my eye Linux is looking about 90% as good as Mac these days. Mac fonts look the best but that os is worse in a lot of other ways. Windows always has looked worst font wise, though I will say it looks better these days than it used to.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 6 months ago

Objectively, Apple is focusing on leveraging high DPI over subpixel tricks.

It makes sense that people who value sharpness on low DPI screens prefer subpixel rendering over grayscale.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 6 months ago (1 children)

I'm partial to macOS and I agree, I think Windows font rendering looks like garbage. On GNOME, I've found things to be okay. Sucks that patents are involved in this mess

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 6 months ago

Windows and Mac rendering have always been ugly as sin to me and I vastly prefer Linux font displays. They always look cleaner and less processed.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago

Thanks a lot for the info! I just went and installed segoe Ui font, and it looked even worse than Ubuntu Regular and I tried all the hinting options and made sure to restart after each change!!!

[–] [email protected] 35 points 6 months ago (2 children)

Can we see some screenshots? It's hard to work just with someone's idea of "better". Not to mention that font rendering can be tweaked on both Windows and Linux and we don't know what settings you've changed so far. Oh and I hope you're comparing the same font otherwise there isn't much point you the comparison.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago (1 children)

And also show ls -l /etc/fonts/conf.d

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago

here you go on pastebin.com

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago (1 children)

I tried to upload a screenshot when creating this post, but it seems there is an issue with the instance I'm on, so I just tried uploading it to Imgur instead so here you go, and oh scaling is set to 1x (there is only 1x which is the default and 2x which I tried today, but it made all the UI elements and text too big and yep I'm not using the same fonts for comparison and I don't think it is as simple to install and use the font used by win 10 and/or 11, and honestly I do not know if using Microsoft font going to fix this issue or not

screenshot these all are the default settings except maybe for Hinting

[–] [email protected] 13 points 6 months ago (2 children)

The biggest problem that I see on this screenshot is that it is a compressed JPEG.

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 6 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 6 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 6 months ago (2 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 6 months ago* (last edited 6 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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Sounds like a fractional scaling issue. Keep the scaling at 100% to avoid those kinds of issues

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago

Scaling has always been set to 1x (100%) and I have never changed it or played with it until today!

[–] [email protected] 11 points 6 months ago (2 children)

I wonder what someone has to do to have worse looking font rendering on Linux. I find the font rendering on Windows worse in every regard and inconsistent (size). On Linux I just set hinting to slight and anti-aliasing to greyscale and all my fonts look nice. Same font with same size on Windows (VSCode is the only program I use on both OS) looks slightly blurred; only the fact that my work display has a higher pixels density makes it ok for me.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 6 months ago

Font rendering is complex and depends on several settings and features lining up perfectly. Anti-aliasing, DPI, fractional scaling, hinting, and subpixel rendering are all important factors that contribute to the quality and appearance of text on a digital display.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 6 months ago (2 children)

Let me guess, Nvidia

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago

Has nothing to do with it.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 6 months ago (2 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 months ago (1 children)

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/font_configuration#Hinting

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago

Thanks. And sorry.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago

This is a correct recommendation, however in Debian-based distros you don't need to edit configuration files manually. Just pick some of preinstalled configs. They are installed in /usr/share/fontconfig/conf.avail and symlinked to /etc/fonts/conf.d.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 6 months ago

The replies here are good. Different rendering engines. Also, try another font. Like Roboto, or Inter, by Google.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 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 6 months ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

On KDE plasma the fractional scaling also plays a role in text rendering. Then there's also the "Legacy Application Scaling" for X11 apps on the Wayland session.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 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)

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago (1 children)

What's the WINE error message you get with the proprietary driver?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago (1 children)

0024:err:winediag:is_broken_driver Broken NVIDIA RandR detected, falling back to RandR 1.0. Please consider using the Nouveau driver instead.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

This error is caused by a compatibility issue between Wine's RandR (X11 display extension) implementation and the NVIDIA proprietary drivers.

a. Install winetricks and run winetricks orm=backbuffer glsl=disable This will configure Wine to use a different rendering method that is compatible with the NVIDIA drivers.

&/Or

b. Use a tool like Q4Wine to configure the Wine prefix and set the "UseRandR" option to "N" This will disable Wine's use of the RandR extension and use a fallback method instead.

That should fix it.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago

Thanks! But I think I will stick with the open source drivers as LibreOffice now runs much faster! Opening and scrolling through the fonts list used to get the GPU utilization to go all the way to 80 to 100% and it was so slow it took the system to register my keyboard Inputs a few seconds but now the issue disappeared!

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago (3 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

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago (1 children)

It's not using Nvidia optimus technology is it? My old laptop had a GT 550M in an optimus configuration which made using linux tricky for quite a long time. Should be easier now i reckon though.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago

There is no integrated GPU so no

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago (1 children)

I don't know. This sounds like some strange thing, never happened to me and I deal a lot with old computers... Maybe try another distro?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago (1 children)

I have always wanted to try opensuse so we will see

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago (2 children)

Fedora atomic versions are great IMHO. Or mx linux or debian if you are looking for something more normal

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago (1 children)

If your next machine has a higher pixel density than 1080p, the need for aggressive hinting diminishes as pixels are smaller & needing to extrapolate subpixels accurately is less important (and less taxing to compute). That wouldn’t help you now, but in the future you may want to consider something like 2.8k which isn’t overkill like 4k on a small laptop display at arm’s length.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago

Thanks for the valuable information! I'm still not sure if I'm gonna get a laptop or build a desktop as an upgrade for the future but one thing is sure is that 1440p is the absolute minimum for me, no way in hell I'm getting anything lower than that

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Nope.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago (2 children)

The cold hard truth :'(

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