I have always been happy with font rendering in GNOME3 under both Wayland and X (I don't think there is any difference). It is maybe not quite as good as MacOS, but it doesn't also have that artificial heaviness that plagued OSX/MacOS for many releases and only seems to have really gone away on Retina screens). It is light years ahead of Windows, which is always bad in confusing ways.

If you have Intel or AMD graphics I think you will be happy with Wayland and Linux.

Nvidia had a politics problem for a long time that is being resolved but the resolution is still on the cutting edge so I would wait a while. XWindows is generally fine.

Dual-GPU laptops with an integrated as well as a discrete GPU seem to still be buggy. Best bet is probably to not use the discrete GPU or plan for the occasional driver update kerfluffle. AMD again is better here.

> Has the font rendering improved at all?

Yes and no. The Linux default are bad because people lack some common taste in font rendering. The default fonts on most distros are pretty awful. Here's my recipe for the best font rendering setup on Linux, which in my eyes is as close as macOS (tested on Fedora 35):

* Have a high DPI screen at 2x scaling

* With a custom fontconfig, force the default sans, serif and mono to the Google Noto fonts. DejaVu and Bitstream are ugly. Don't use them.

* Copy and install the ttf files from your closest C:\Windows\Fonts directory. Everyone on the internet uses Windows fonts. HN and Old Reddit use Verdana.

* And the best for last: disable font hinting. Modern distros default to slight hinting, which is still too much hinting and distorts the font. MacOS doesn't apply any hinting.

Thank you for this detailed response. Over the holiday I'll give it a go :)

Screen tearing is mostly just a matter of configuration. The only platforms that really suffered from it were Nvidia systems, and with the v470/v495 drivers those have pretty much sorted out.

Font rendering is fine by my eyes, but apparently it has gotten significantly worse on GNOME 40/GTK4[0]. On KDE it's quite nice these days though, so I guess you should just give it another whirl and see for yourself.

[0] https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/3787

> Screen tearing is mostly just a matter of configuration.

This is not true. It's caused by drawing out sync with the vblank cycle. It has nothing do with specific hardware. Older versions of X11 didn't even allow drawing to be synced to vblank (the start of the raster retrace).

This is mostly irrelevant with modern compositors. If you force the compositor pipeline, the worst it will do is drop frames. To my knowledge, the only hardware that doesn't do this by default is Nvidia GPUs, which have a specific configuration option to enable it.

I always find such statements very confusing. It's like hearing someone if TVs still have that problem with needing to adjust the rabbit ears constantly while 90% of people have plugged theirs into a cable or satellite receiver. Font rendering worked fine in 2003. There is under skin certainly a lot of potentially interesting complexity around font rendering but you needn't much care about the details.

Some distributions look like Ubuntu look pretty good out of the box others look like garbage out of the box. Fedora used to be notoriously ugly out of the box in part because it was wary of implementing patent encumbered techniques. It's probably improved since. Notably firefox when rendering websites with some common on windows fonts in systems without many fonts installed may make some interesting and crappy choices insofar as substitution. If you install common MS fonts or tell firefox that websites aren't allowed to do their own thing you can avoid firefox raining on your font rendering parade.

If you want good looking fonts and don't like how it looks out of the box you mostly want to google good looking fonts in "foo" where foo is your distribution even though most advice is universal between distributions then consider installing some decent fonts.

For example in void linux following this gets good results.

https://blog.brunomiguel.net/geekices/how-to-get-good-font-r...

No wizardry involved just rote direction following.

For void the google-fronts-ttf provides an absolute ton of fonts in ubuntu ttf-mscorefonts-installer provides some common ms oriented fonts. Nerd fonts provides a lot of interesting fonts. https://www.nerdfonts.com/ which you can install manually or via a distro package if there is one for you. They provide many fonts patched with lots of additional symbols.

I also happen to think San Francisco from Apple looks nice. If you use the font patcher from nerd fonts you can have Apple font's on your Linux Desktop.

ET-Book is interesting

https://github.com/edwardtufte/et-book

This Emacser made a font out of her handwriting with instructions on how it was done so you too can type like you write for good or ill.

https://github.com/sachac/sachac-hand/

Personally I prefer the font rendering on Linux to Windows and have for many years.

Thank you so much for all of this info! I will give this a whirl over the holidays.

I don't have screen tearing on x.org.

If you use GNOME and wayland I never once felt I had an issue, but GNOME is more limiting for configuration than OSX.

How is that last statement true? macOS is basically not customizable, and gnome can be themed, even with the new changes (https://blogs.gnome.org/alatiera/2021/09/18/the-truth-they-a...)

https://www.maketecheasier.com/how-to-customize-mac/#Custom-... So this?

No, according to the post I shared, you can do more than that:

> You can also recolor any part of a widget however you like

And they show an example of a gradient background and stuff like that.

And I mean, for most people, a theme is just coloring things how they like and setting the font and visual things. While full-blown stylesheets are very cool, and I think still “allowed,” you can’t really officially support that in a compatible way. You have to set an API so that everything can be consistent.

For example, it can currently be a huge pain to change the accent color on PopOS away from orange because you can’t just set a variable somewhere. It seems like the new system will improve that.

Either way, leaps and bounds ahead of macOS

I'm going to be real with you, if your definition of 'theming' is setting an accent color and choosing between light and dark mode... I think I feel really bad for you.