
The sad state of font rendering on Linux - iBelieve
https://pandasauce.org/post/linux-fonts/
======
tathougies
I prefer Mac to Windows. This is a subjective thing. Mac and Windows are
optimized towards different use cases. Mac is optimized towards WYSIWYG
display for desktop publishing. OS X displays fonts _exactly_ as they'd appear
on a page. Windows makes adjustments to character positions to align them to
the pixel grid. This results in clearer text, but at the expense of things
being slightly off as they'd appear in print.

Ultimately, different strokes for different folks. While you're not wrong that
Cleartype is empirically better for most people for text content, it is
objectively worse, by design, for those for whom positional precision matters.

> This occurs because Apple didn’t dare go near any ClearType patents that
> Microsoft got for their rendering techniques. For decades OS X remained a
> very ugly baby, until in 2015 they just gave us courage HiDPI in form of
> Retina. This was a bid to make all hinting technology obsolete and put
> everyone else to shame.

Is just wrong. Apple intentionally chooses to display fonts the way they do.
This is quite the extraordinary claim -- that a company that is otherwise
known for design would not focus on their fonts.

With regard to the freetype font size rendering. You claim that freetype
doesn't scale the fonts smoothly, but then you also claim Windows does it
correctly. Just FYI, Windows most certainly does not scale fonts linearly. OS
X does of course, given its focus on publishing. Windows cleartype actually
changes the font size in order to make text readable. If linearity of font
scaling is a metric by which you measure font engines, then cleartype is a
failure.

In case anyone doesn't believe the claim above, this article
([https://damieng.com/blog/2007/06/13/font-rendering-
philosoph...](https://damieng.com/blog/2007/06/13/font-rendering-philosophies-
of-windows-and-mac-os-x)) goes into it in depth.

~~~
MagicPropmaker
Fonts are _never_ scaled "linearly." A 5 point font magnified to twice its
size will look different than the same font at 10 points. See
[https://alistapart.com/column/font-hinting-and-the-future-
of...](https://alistapart.com/column/font-hinting-and-the-future-of-
responsive-typography) for a discussion. (And look in Knuth's "Metafont")

Windows handles fonts correctly. And Cleartype is an option you can turn on
and off. It makes fonts look "more correct" on many types of displays. Are you
saying it's better not to have that option available at all?

~~~
cmiles74
I'm not sure what "more correct" means in this context. Coming from a MacOS
background, it is my opinion that ClearType makes fonts look worse.

Regardless of my personal opinion, it's clear that other people share this
opinon. For instance, Word doesn't use ClearType; they had problems with text
on different colored backgrounds.[0][1]

[0]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ClearType#cite_note-
Word-3](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ClearType#cite_note-Word-3)

[1]: [https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/murrays/2014/05/31/crisp-
te...](https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/murrays/2014/05/31/crisp-text-
display/)

~~~
MagicPropmaker
Mac on the left, Windows with cleartype on the right. Adobe InDesign

[https://imgoat.com/uploads/74ad4786c3/203900.png](https://imgoat.com/uploads/74ad4786c3/203900.png)

------
foobarbazetc
“What they didn’t account for is that an overwhelming majority of legacy
software had 96 DPI hardcoded into it, as well as the problem of mixed use of
HiDPI and non-HiDPI displays where you need to somehow scale the entire UI
back-and-forth when moved between displays. Since Windows never had the font
rendering problems that Apple did, majority of the computer market share
didn’t back the ultra-expensive 4K screens even to this day (2018). Software
maintainers too didn’t buy into the idea of massive code rewrites and UI
tinkering to support DPIs other than 96. As of today, 4K experience is still a
mixed bag that solves one simple problem for Apple, but introduces multiple
complex problems for everyone else.”

Uhmmm.... [citation needed]?

I don’t have a single Mac app that assumes anything about 96 dpi and pretty
much the entire Internet is 2x now.

Windows on the other hand... yes. That’s a clusterf __k in HiDPI.

~~~
mikewhy
Why was this downvoted? This paragraph was one of the worst in the article.

> Since Windows never had the font rendering problems that Apple did

Uhm I cannot reliably use windows with any sort of scaling. It's not as bad as
linux, but it's still very bad.

> Software maintainers too didn’t buy into the idea of massive code rewrites
> and UI tinkering to support DPIs other than 96

(on Windows)

~~~
izacus
> Uhm I cannot reliably use windows with any sort of scaling. It's not as bad
> as linux, but it's still very bad.

That seems like a massive overexaggeration. While there are still rough edges,
running Windows on my MacBooks retina screen has been just fine for majority
of popular apps. Including mixed HiDPI/normal DPI use cases.

~~~
mikewhy
Doesn't that just reiterate my point? "While there are still rough edges" ==
"I cannot reliably use windows with any sort of scaling"

Take QGIS for example. It doesn't properly scale. On Windows you get an
miniscule interface, on mac it's the same size as all other apps, just blurry.
I'll take that any day.

------
crazygringo
> _OS X objectively has the absolute worst font rendering. It does not use
> hinting at all and relies only on grayscale anti-aliasing. This makes
> everything appear very bold and blurry._

This almost reads like satire.

It's well-known that Windows prefers to distort letterforms for the sake of
crispness, while Macs preserve letterforms for the sake of fidelity.

Saying that one is better than the other is _entirely_ subjective -- there are
many, many articles on the subject. There's absolutely nothing objective about
it.

If it were so "objective", then it seems quite odd that Macs would be the
predominant choice of graphic designs and type designers, who would be
expected to care about this the most...

~~~
waynecochran
Steve Jobs took type-faces and font rendering more seriously than anyone else
in the computer industry except for maybe Donald Knuth. He discovered
calligraphy while at Reed College and it changed him forever.

<aside> I am still amazed at how crappy MS Word at typesetting. I write these
beautiful papers in LaTeX with incredible math type setting and then sometimes
I am asked to convert to Word -- it almost makes me cry to ruin my "art" to
convert it to Word. </aside>

It it an affront to my aesthetic taste to look at a Windows UI.

~~~
mixmastamyk
Not defending Windows, but I find the common latex font clumsy and hard to
read.

~~~
snazz
Computer Modern is very thin. I personally prefer Computer Concrete, in a
similar vein, because it is simpler and easier to read on low-DPI displays.
Although I’m not sure about this, it feels as though Computer Modern was
designed to take into account a bit of bleed, which is why it looks better as
a high-resolution inkjet print.

Regardless of which font you use, TeX will produce a much higher quality
document (esp. math) than Word, at the expense of an upfront time investment
in learning to use it.

------
scblock
As others have noted this is a hilariously bad post, because in practice
Windows (which is so enthusiastically praised here) is incredibly inconsistent
in font rendering program by program, and on most non-hidpi screens looks like
trash. Especially when using scaled displays (such as 1.25 or 1.5x scaling on
a 4k screen), where half of software turns into a blurry, unreadable mess.

~~~
neilalexander
As seen even in Windows itself, including but not limited to various places in
the Control Panel. The situation is even worse if you are a laptop user that
sometimes connects to external displays with a different pixel densities.
Things will often either get upscaled or downscaled depending upon the display
used at the point that the application was opened, sometimes requiring the
application to be closed and re-opened to render at the correct resolution or
- worse still - requiring you to log out of Windows and back in again! Trying
to use high-DPI displays on Windows is an unmitigated nightmare.

~~~
Mister_Snuggles
My big question about this is Why?

Why is Windows such a mess about this and how did Apple manage to pull it off
with virtually no fanfare?

For a while was connecting a Retina MBP to two non-Retina monitors. Sometimes,
when dragging a window from the laptop display to a non-Retina monitor I'd see
a flash of everything scaled up. Other than that, I've seen none of the
problems that seem to still plague Windows 10.

I'm sure the answer has to do with the history of Windows - I'd love to see
someone like Raymond Chen dig deep into this.

~~~
wbond
The why has to do with how Windows and macOS approached scaling.

On macOS, to get anything above 100%, you render the whole interface at 200%
(including layout), and the OS scales the resulting pixel output to the
display's scale.

On Windows, every application has to detect the scale of the monitor it is
being displayed on and do layout at the exact scale. (Actually, that isn't
entirely true, if you wrote an app before the high dpi additions, you always
render at 100% and Window scales it up for you, which results in a blurry
mess.) It is very easy for layouts at 125% to have gaps and varying width
lines depending on where on the device pixels the coordinates land.

Adding _mixed_ high DPI support to Sublime Text for Mac was very simple
compared to adding it for Windows. On Mac the OS tells us when to render at
200%, and everything in regards to layout is then doubled. On Windows we have
to re-layout and snap dimensions to device pixel boundaries to get something
that looks crisp when moving a window from one display to another. The code
changes were far more invasive for Windows.

We support high dpi on Linux, but haven't added mixed high DPI support yet.
Gnome limits users to integer scales (1.0, 2.0, 3.0), but with tweak tools it
is possible to get fractional scaling. All of those are fine, it is just when
you need to re-layout in fractional scales on the fly that you have to expose
the scale of the current display to the entire UI library, or sometimes have
gaps and overlaps.

------
jxdxbx
This guy has some pretty weird opinions. Not only do I much prefer macOS's
accurate font rendering aesthetically, the entire issue of sub pixel aliasing
is moot with high-DPI screens anyway.

~~~
Marsymars
I look forward to the day when I can drop in a high-DPI screen to my home
office setup that works just like my current non high-DPI screen, but with a
higher pixel density.

(5K ultrawides to replace my 34" monitor simply don't exist yet, and the
current 12" MacBook can't drive a regular 5K monitor.)

------
badsectoracula
> Some users even disable all ClearType rendering and anti-aliasing, claiming
> that it reduces eyestrain and that anti-aliasing damages eyesight. It’s kind
> of like anti-vaxxing (hello from 2019 if you are reading this in the
> future).

I hope the anti-vaxxing comparison is only for the "eyesight damage" part,
otherwise this paragraph is bullshit in its entirety. From my own personal
experience, i _vastly_ prefer antialising disabled, _assuming that there fonts
used have hinting available that support it_. Or even better, bitmap fonts
made to be clean and crisp (as opposed to just being rasterized versions of
vector fonts). Of course if you try to use fonts that disregard hinting and
aren't compatible (or even tested at all) with antialiasing disabled, like the
font the author's site uses which looks like total crap on my PC, then, yeah,
compared to that i prefer AA with CT.

I find annoying that you need to mess with the registry to disable
antialiasing in Windows 10, but at least the option is still there.

~~~
aidenn0
SPR absolutely gives me eyestrain, though I can't blind test it because on a
1920x1200 display I can easily see the fringing.

------
jchw
I'm surprised there was hardly any mention of pixel grid fitting, or even just
accuracy. My favorite article on font rendering is one from Antigrain
Geometry[1] that goes a fair bit further in improving subpixel rendering imo.

Nonetheless their use of the word objective is very annoying since I greatly
prefer grayscale with no hinting even on Linux at 96 DPI. It's a bit blurry,
but it consistently looks right. No kerning issues.

Also, it is laughable to suggest that Windows never had issues with font
rendering. Just look at Microsoft Word struggling to balance between
accurately displaying documents and rendering the fonts with Cleartype as
shown in the AGG article.

[1]:
[http://www.antigrain.com/research/font_rasterization/](http://www.antigrain.com/research/font_rasterization/)

------
coleifer
I don't know...turn on subpixel with slight hinting, disable autohinter,
enable lcdfilter and the result is pretty damn good. For monospace truetype
fonts I use grayscale instead of subpixel, which I think is cleaner in the
terminal... unless of course I'm using a bitmapped font. It took me quite a
while to get it looking good, but ultimately I guess it's a matter of taste.
Do you want to preserve the look of the font? Do you want to smash it into the
grid? Do you want colors on the fringes? With Linux I can choose.

~~~
elros
> Do you want to preserve the look of the font? Do you want to smash it into
> the grid? Do you want colors on the fringes? With Linux I can choose.

I have no idea. I want it to look good. With macOS I don't have to choose.

~~~
badsectoracula
The idea is that "look good" is subjective, case in point: you apparently
think the font rendering on macOS looks good, whereas the author of the linked
article thinks that font rendering on macOS looks bad and instead likes the
font rendering on Windows 7.

~~~
snazz
I am of the same opinion as the author of the article. Mac fonts look blurry
compared to ClearType. I usually use bitmapped fonts in Emacs and xterm,
however, to sidestep the issue altogether. Fontconfig is always an option if
needed. On the other hand, I really can’t tell the difference on an HiDPI
display, even though I don’t use one (or want one, for that matter).

Whatever the defaults are in Firefox on OpenBSD look superb on my monitor.

------
smacktoward
_> The traditional way of [installing the Windows core Web fonts] is through
installing ttf-mscorefonts-installer or msttcorefonts. The msttcorefonts
package looks like some Shenzhen basement knockoff that renders poorly and
doesn’t support Unicode. I suspect that these fonts have gone through multiple
iterations in every Windows release and that the versions available through
the repositories must be from around Windows 95 days._

That does seem to be the case. Per Wiki
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_fonts_for_the_Web](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_fonts_for_the_Web)):

 _> The latest font-versions that were available from Microsoft's Core fonts
for the Web project were 2.x (e.g. 2.82 for Arial, Times New Roman and Courier
New for MS Windows), published in 2000. Later versions (such as version 3 or
version 5 with many new characters) were not available from this project. A
Microsoft spokesman declared in 2002 that members of the open source community
"will have to find different sources for updated fonts."_

So while Windows and MacOS both have up-to-date versions of these fonts
(Windows because Microsoft owns them, and MacOS because Apple licenses them
from MS), the best Linux distributors can do is to package the last versions
released before the 2002 re-licensing. (Or at least, that's the best they can
do without paying Microsoft.)

------
BearOso
There’s not enough resolution at 96dpi to render fonts correctly. You have to
make compromises one way or another. Windows snaps to pixel boundaries more
strongly, while Mac does no hinting to keep shapes correct.

The author, while his opinion should be taken lightly, is trying to get
subpixel positioning into Chrome and GTK. This is something positive, and
something Windows and MacOS already have. Qt can do it, too, but as of a few
years ago KDE/Plasma was actively disabling it because of inconsistencies in
Xlib and image rendering backends.

------
greatquux
I actually do prefer font rendering on Linux to Windows. It strikes a good
balance between Mac and Windows rendering.

------
asumaran
He lost me at

> OS X objectively has the absolute worst font rendering.

~~~
vernie
"Do a controlled reading speed experiment against Windows."

Nobody will do this.

------
sametmax
s/font rendering/wifi

s/font rendering/bluetooth

s/font rendering/sleep mode

s/font rendering/battery life

I've been using Linux for 15 years now (started on Mandrake), but those issues
haven't been fixed in a decade.

I really want to support free software, so I keep using it, reporting bugs and
donating again and again. Many do. We hope that like with Firefox, if we
support it consistently, it will eventually overcome the situation.

But damn it's hard sometimes.

~~~
lallysingh
I don't use BT so I can't speak to it, but I've been dual Linux/Mac for ~20
yrs, and the linux laptop situation is spectacularly good if you use
thinkpads. At least it has been for me. Dell ships some good ones too, but I
haven't tried them.

On non-thinkpad/xps machines (which I'm not saying you're using or talking
about, I'm just gonna assume), it's a crapshoot. But I think it's no better
than running macos on a pc laptop or windows on a mac laptop (at least the
last time I tried years ago, via their dual-boot thing).

~~~
sametmax
Like the others, jumping around shooting "it's fine" is not going to help.

I'm writting this from an Ubuntu 16.04 on an XPS 13. Sometime it wakes up from
sleep modes with no wifi or bluetooth, and I have to force a reboot. Bluetooth
doesn't work out of the box, I have to use blueman just to have a working
mouse. But even with these, headphones won't work.

I had a XPS 15 before. It was not better.

~~~
maccam94
I have the 2018 XPS 13, running Ubuntu. It worked pretty well on 16.04, until
I upgraded past kernel 4.15. Now there's a bug where it either won't stay
asleep, or when it wakes up the WiFi and Bluetooth devices are non-functional
(even reloading the modules does nothing). I have recently discovered that
disabling BT+WiFi via the keyboard function key before suspending avoids the
problem, but it's annoying. I think it's also related to Intel making firmware
changes for a Windows sleep mode that stays connected to WiFi.

I think this bug report is tracking the issue:
[https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/1799988](https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/1799988)

------
alexandernst
I used to use Windows and Linux for a very, very, very long time. Never even
thought "hey, those fonts don't look quite as good as they could". Then one
day I tried Mac. Period.

Oh boy, ever since I just _can 't_ use anything else because of the fonts. It
visually hurts my eyes.

~~~
favorited
Font rendering is one of a handful of things that keep my Mac as my daily
driver, and my PC is just for gaming (and occasional experiments with Windows
dev, just to learn new things).

------
jimbo1qaz
[https://www.freetype.org/freetype2/docs/text-rendering-
gener...](https://www.freetype.org/freetype2/docs/text-rendering-general.html)

> It turns out that font rendering in the Linux ecosystem has been wrong since
> scalable fonts were introduced to it. Text must be rendered with linear
> alpha blending and gamma correction, which no toolkit or rendering library
> does by default on X11, even though Qt5 and Skia (as used by Google Chrome
> and other browsers) can do it.

The primary effect of no gamma correction is that light-on-dark text is too
thin (and dark-on-light is thick but readable).

------
mrob
I used to care a great deal about font rendering, but when I got eyeglasses I
had trouble learning to focus with them. To make it easier, I disabled anti-
aliasing, giving the fonts maximum sharpness, and making it obvious if I was
focusing correctly.

Surprisingly, I got used to this and never switched back. The most legible
font is the one you're most used to, but if there's any objective measure of
quality, it has to be sharpness. No anti-aliasing = maximum sharpness. It
might look ugly at first, but you get used to it quickly. I recommend trying
it.

------
strenholme
My subjective take on font rendering, based on tweaking and hinting web fonts,
is that MacOS has the best font rendering (since their laptops have been using
retina displays, with the exception of the Macbook Air; even here the font
rendering may look a little blurry but the fonts look quite good and are
readable); Linux has quite good font rendering (they may make the letters look
bigger on low resolution displays, but things are nice and readable); and
Windows font rendering is very uneven.

Most browsers have their own take of Clear type font rendering when rendering
web fonts. While some make web fonts look quite good (Firefox, Internet
Explorer/Edge), Chrome has had issues with using settings which make fonts
harder to read; I had to increase the weight of the font I use some to
compensate for this. Clear Type, on the default settings Chrome used for a
long time, is really great, if you’re rendering a Windows font like Calibri or
Cambria. For anything else, the results are uneven. (I think Chrome finally
started tweaking things in Windows to look better)

In terms of the linked webpage, his comparison is unfair: He is comparing how
Arial, a Microsoft font, looks in Linux compared to how it looks in Windows.
Liberation Sans has the same metrics as Arial, so is not a good comparison
font; he should had used something more OS-agnostic, such as Bitstream Vera
Sans (DejaVu Sans if you want more languages).

------
petercooper
_OS X objectively has the absolute worst font rendering. It does not use
hinting at all and relies only on grayscale anti-aliasing._

And yet OS X's font rendering being by far the best _for me_ is a key thing
that has kept me on the Mac despite all the other warts. I find text elsewhere
horribly blocky. It's all very subjective, it seems. Also, I think the
grayscale antialiasing is a new thing, it certainly didn't used to be the
case, but maybe they switched how it worked once retina screens became the
norm.

------
driverdan
For everyone criticizing his views on MacOS X, try using an external display
with a lower PPI. It's not obvious on native laptop screens with 220+ppi.

On my Dell U3415W (109ppi) the issues he pointed out are very obvious. An
equal sign (=) for example has a much thicker and blurrier bottom bar than the
top. The rendering of the H in "History" is different than the H in "Help" in
the menu bar.

------
Insanity
Personally, the font rendering in a Windows terminal looks abysmal to me. I
hugely prefer my linux terminals (out of the box).

Just my 2c

~~~
mixmastamyk
That's not a terminal, but a console, and uses ancient GDI graphics.

------
linuxftw
Weird. I just opened a PDF on my linux PC, everything displayed perfectly. I
haven't done anything with fonts, everything is default Fedora install.

Linux seems to have a lot of detractors around these parts. This person
obviously cares more about fonts than freedom, privacy, and respect for the
end user.

~~~
onli
I absolutely can reproduce the main issue he is describing at the end. Open
[https://trailofbits.github.io/ctf/](https://trailofbits.github.io/ctf/) and
look at "Willing". Compare with
[https://pandasauce.org/images/fonts/72-liberation-
browser.pn...](https://pandasauce.org/images/fonts/72-liberation-browser.png).
On my linux system - where I spent considerable time making the fonts look
acceptable after moving to it from Ubuntu - there is also the kerning issue in
that word. That's a shame.

There might be inaccuracies and subjectivity in the article, but if really all
engines have that issue that's a real problem.

~~~
linuxftw
If I look at 'willing' closely on that page, there is what I perceive to be
about a 20% increase of spacing between the the second 'l' and the second 'i'
character.

I didn't notice it at first, I had to look at it very closely.

~~~
onli
That's horrible, isn't it? The author does have a valid bug there that really
is a big issue if you care about this sort of thing (some people just don't
care how fonts look and can't notice kerning issues), but the whole comment
thread is discussing very subjective rendering differences between Windows,
Linux and OSX, where Linux isn't even bad. Though I think the author did
himself no favor with not leading with that bug.

~~~
linuxftw
Meh. Not a huge deal, like I said, didn't even notice it. If I zoom to 110% or
more, the spacing is fine.

------
Aardwolf
I'm probably less picky than the author of the article, but issues I do notice
are (in Linux, but since I only use it I don't know if they exist in other
OSes too):

-some websites render with a very strange font, that includes quote symbols '"' being very tiny, which I'm not sure if actually intended like that or a problem in linux specifically, and sometimes all letters being rendered in such ugly way to be hard to read

-symbols in mathematical formulas (some types of arrow, ...) rendered as colored emoji, even if they shouldn't in that situation since it's not a chat program according to the unicode spec

-sometimes unicode chars becoming a square box, even if having tons of fonts installed

~~~
chrisseaton
> according to the unicode spec

Does the Unicode specification cover how glyphs should look and what colour
they should be?

~~~
tatersolid
> Does the Unicode specification cover how glyphs should look and what colour
> they should be?

Umm... yes? Unicode includes “reference glyphs” in its character charts.
They’re called “reference” for a reason: implementations of those glyphs
should appear substantially similar.

------
ingenieroariel
I recently moved to nixos with sway for my desktop and after trying Firefox
with wayland there I realized I had never seen text in linux so sharp.

I read the whole post but could not tell if what he mentions implicates both
xorg as well as wayland?

------
sigspec
This article is "OBJECTIVELY" bad.

------
marsrover
I came here to bitch about the fact that Mac has "objectively" the worst
fonts, when I've preferred it over Windows or Linux for years. Glad to see
everybody has my back.

------
carlospwk
Really interesting read on how fonts render on different systems. However a
huge reason why I went from Win to macOS are the incredibly frustrating
scaling issues. At work I gave up and just set my laptop display to 100% since
I’d rather deal with the occasional tiny text than always having incredibly
blurry fonts in certain crucial apps like Outlook.

I do agree that macOS fonts are nearly unreadable without a Retina/4K display.
However I’ve never noticed any scaling issues on macOS.

------
commoner
There is a way to restore Infinality-like font rendering on freetype2, which
improves text readability. Linux users may find these instructions helpful:

[https://gist.github.com/cryzed/e002e7057435f02cc7894b9e748c5...](https://gist.github.com/cryzed/e002e7057435f02cc7894b9e748c5671)

Skip the "Removing the infinality-bundle" section if you don't currently use
Infinality.

------
tinza123
I honestly think freetype on Linux looks much better than windows (too thin
and sharp) and mac (too muddy).

------
vore
A related article from AGG talking about some of the subtleties of font
rasterization:
[http://www.antigrain.com/research/font_rasterization/](http://www.antigrain.com/research/font_rasterization/)

------
ktjfi
"The sad state of <minor desktop feature> on Linux"

Linux on the desktop is death by a thousand cuts.

~~~
GlenTheMachine
Yep.

I just tried a three month experiment with using Linux as the primary OS on my
laptop. That experiment came to an end last week, and I'm back to macOS.

What killed me was:

\- wake-on-open working about 33% of the time. The other 66% of the time
required a reboot.

\- substantially worse battery life

\- clunky handling of Exchange calendars. The major Linux applications are
fine for personal use, but they really struggle in an enterprise environment.

\- buggy rendering of Word docs (both OpenOffice and Abiword, but the bugs
were different)

\- no easy way to change screen resolution over VNC. This turns out to be
important if you actually try to use screen sharing to get stuff done, and use
two or more different platforms as the client.

\- the straw that broke the camel's back: my linux email client worked well
(for emails - not calendars, etc) for almost the entire three month
experiment, until last Friday it somehow decided that my password was
different from what it actually was, and insisted on interrogating the
enterprise email server several times a second using the bad password. The
Exchange server here is configured to lock an account after N incorrect
passwords. So effectively the client auto-locked my account every time I fired
it up. I still have no idea why it's using an incorrect password, and
debugging it wold require my sysadmin to essentially stay on the phone with me
and keep hitting the "unlock account" button, or whatever he has to do. My
relationship with him would not survive this, and using Linux isn't worth
pissing him off.

So, back to the Mac for me. I'll try again in another five years and see if
anything's improved. It wasn't any one big thing. It was a lot of little
things. Bugs that probably were work-around-able, but not worth it. Little
bits of friction in the office applications interfaces that made using them
just a little more painful. Multiply by a thousand, and you have a
substantially worse productivity environment (unless you're a software
developer 100% of the time, which I'm not).

~~~
izacus
Considering the problems... were you actually trying to run Linux on a
MacBook, which is pretty much a full proprietary, non-documented platform with
bunch of Apple proprietary and undocumented power management controllers?

~~~
GlenTheMachine
No. Dell XPS 15.

------
mixmastamyk
I quite like the fonts on linux with my 4k monitors, subpixel smoothing, and
slight hinting. Mac and Windows are also fine on a ~200 dpi monitor. Believe
this is a solved problem for those who do not obsess about fonts.

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ggm
The bad part is that you need to do a s/objective/subjective/g on it. Once you
realize it's subjective, it's a fun fine informative _rant_

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vernie
macOS had subpixel rendering until the most recent version (Mojave), where
it's disabled by default.

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fizixer
Funny how you singled out Linux, a free/open source OS.

Because just a few days ago I read that fonts, as well as UI elements in
general, are a complete mess in both Mac and Windows, two paid/closed-source
OSes, when you try to use them with Hi DPI displays.

