Well, Chrome OS runs the same stuff as your average Linux distro, however maybe most distros don't turn on subpixel antialiasing in their FontConfig out of the box. (I don't know because I've been sharing configs between machines of the same distro for about five years).
With HiDPI, that doesn't matter anyway.
Another issue are fonts themselves. If you have a document that uses Arial or Cambria or another proprietary font, and you don't have it installed, you are going to get something substituted, which may or may be not metrics-compatible. Do not expect pixel-identical results then.
If I'm not mistaken, those patents are dead now. Even Fedora has the freeworld stuff now.
> Another issue are fonts themselves. If you have a document that uses Arial or Cambria or another proprietary font, and you don't have it installed, you are going to get something substituted, which may or may be not metrics-compatible. Do not expect pixel-identical results then.
Yeah, though the Chrome OS core fonts are good metric-compatible substitutes for Arial and friends (though lacking the stylistic variety of the core Windows fonts).
Not the subpixel rendering ones ("cleartype"). In Fedora, FT_CONFIG_OPTION_SUBPIXEL_RENDERING is still disabled.
Google also released metric compatible substitutes for Cambria (Caladea) and Calibri (Carlito), but Linux distributions do not install them by default.
Edit: I'm wrong. In F27, the subpixel rendering is enabled.
https://www.chromium.org/blink/slimming-paint
https://www.chromium.org/developers/design-documents/gpu-acc...
Skia can only use what the underlying graphics drivers offer.
Every single time I decide that I'm moving to Linux, I give up after living with the browsers for a day or two. Rendering and fonts are just inferior to other systems in my experience.