I generally replace the monospace/console font - but i do that on MacOS and windows too.
Tbh I find the lack of decent (tiled) wm (as well as broken display on "low-res" (1440p/QHD) external displays) on MacOS much more frustrating. I make do with yabai, but the hoops one needs to jump through and the resulting fragile setup isn't great.
Hm, now i came across this - so maybe there's a decent fix for that too?
Curious as to what's being referred to here. I've used 27" 2560x1440 displays with macOS for a long time, both with Intel and M-series Macs.
I had to buy a new monitor and went with a 1440p to save money, but returned it and got the 4K. It's significantly better.
In some ways, this is smart - it avoids the need for applications to handle anything other than 1x and 2x modes, and it avoids the complications of handling fractional pixel sizes (how does an application draw a 1 logical pixel wide line at a 1.5x scale).
In other ways it is monumentally stupid. The macOS technique wastes resources rendering at a higher resolution than you actually need. Worse, even though the downscaling is excellent in macOS, it still has ringing artifacts and it still is blurrier than native fractional scaling.
This is personally one of the things that I hate most about macOS. Many Mac laptops ship with internal displays that default to a resolution that is scaled in this way (though fortunately not the 14/16 inch Apple Silicon MacBook Pro). That's annoying, but it's not nearly as bad as the situation with external displays. I use a UHD (3840x2160) 32" display. On Windows it's perfect at 1.25x scale. On macOS, my laptop ends up rendering at 6144x3456 and then scaling the output down. This looks very noticably blurry, and it's a huge waste of resources.
Only Windows really gets this right among desktop/laptop operating systems.
GNOME uses the same behavior as macOS, except that the "render at higher resolution and scale down" options are hidden by default, and the scaling itself is a lot blurrier.
KDE does support native fractional scaling, but there are a ton of bugs related to rounding errors causing 1px gaps and random cases where applications end up being blurry, especially on Wayland. Worse, display scaling changes often don't apply until you log out or restart applications, which is particularly annoying if you have a different scale factor on an internal and external display.
Windows on the other hand handles this relatively well, although there are still some annoying bugs on Windows 10 related to the taskbar and notifications (mostly fixed in Windows 11). There are also still a lot of Windows applications that do not handle scaling at all, which end up in blur city.
This doesn't sound right - i had gnome/Wayland running on two external displays with different fractional scaling - and a window spanning the gap or being moved from one screen to the other looked fine?
This (fractional scaling) only worked under Wayland - but there it worked fine.
It was my mainly driver for a few years and I remember at least a few announcements of breaking changes.
Making a font change to an open source project is a good way to attract angry replies in issue trackers if you’re not careful. The Perfect Configuration (TM) simply doesn’t exist.
In both of these images you can clearly see bad color bleed in the title bar font, and in the content font in the after case. I'm guessing the users main concern is that they want a higher text density which the after shot demonstrates. IMO both of these cases can be improved substantially to remove the color faults using grayscale subpixel rather than this colorful mess.
RGB subpixel has not looked good on any screen I've used in what about 10 years? The shapes of displays no longer produces good results with these techniques.
Why? Take a picture of your screen from close up with a modern phone and zoom in. You may see a non-RGB layout, but even if you don't you'll almost certainly observe a pattern where the empty space is significantly vertically larger around one boundary (often red/blue), this is related to the brightness targets monitors have been hitting for so long. As the pixels no longer align with the theoretical shape, if you can see the colors, the colors often look super trashy.
Since then I have yet to see an environment meet that bar, and have wasted no more time configuring X, fonts, compositors, themes, key binds, etc. I look forward to this changing one day, but I'm not expecting it soon. The ecosystem moves between technical targets too often to reach sufficient polish to meet the bar.