It is a matter of personal preference. I personally love the look when there is no hinting at all, even though this means blurriness at the pixel level. Windows prioritizes crispness. I hate that and I think it looks worse.

On the other hand, back in Mac OS X Leopard, the OS lets you adjust the level of font smoothing. I preferred the strongest level of smoothing. Many designers hate that because it is akin to faux bold. I didn't like that Apple removed it in Snow Leopard. These days it hardly matters though.