In terms of desktop environments, I've only used Ubuntu and Fedora recently, but I've found their font rendering to be sufficiently pleasant. Either way, the lower-level features of the OS are much more important to me, as is probably the case with most Linux users.
they are? i thought when they were configured correctly they were considered similar in quality, but different in approach to osx (there is a long article somewhere discussing this, but i cannot find it now i need to reference it, sorry).
Above with an Opensuse 12.3 installation updated from RC2 to the release, with nvidia proprietary drivers installed (GO2 version, GT520 card) and ms web core fonts installed (fetchmsttfonts). Screen resolution is the default 96 dpi.
Looks not far south of Ubuntu to me. How bad does it look to you?
Ubuntu have a patched library and sensible defaults that gives their distributions a better out of box (off DVD?)experience. I wish others would pay attention to this kind of detail.
I've found that with nvidia graphics cards I need to use the proprietary drivers; nouveau is not quite there yet with fonts in my experience. I'd be delighted if someone has a font-config fix for that as nouveau is pretty nice these days.
KDE hides the hinting/subpixel antialiassing settings in Application Appearance / Fonts from memory.
As a Debian user that was something that I wasn't satisfied, and which Ubuntu did much better than anyone else, finally I found this link and I could match Ubuntu font rendering.
when I set up my debian VM on a new laptop recently, it took me a few days to (be bothered to) figure out how to fix font rendering in XFCE. Once I did, I could use the same fonts and font sizes as in OS X with comparable (although slightly different) final effect.
