That's the problem. Apple's typography is well ahead of anything in the Linux world, and even Linux is still ahead of what Windows has.

The "Retina" screens make this even harder to match.

For sure, but I'm not such a typography nerd that what's on Linux is unacceptable to me. Ultimately I'm going to get my work done however is most efficient; that just tends to be Linux. My Mac (which I'm using now) is great for web browsing and reading articles. I'd sooner use my Kindle for that than my Linux laptop though and often I do.

Once Apple makes a retina iPad around 10 inches and lets me use my own USB keyboard, I'll never use anything else. If that iPad Pro rumor pans out, it'd better have USB.

I've been impressed that typography on Linux isn't as bad as Windows, but it's still got a long way to go to measure up to Apple. It's not just clarity and accuracy of the typefaces themselves, but subtle details like how the ligatures (things like how "fi" and "ff" are rendered) are properly applied.

Typography is one of those things that, once you've seen it, you can't un-see it. You can only try to not care.

Apple's not interested in adding USB to the iPad since Bluetooth already does anything USB can do and more, at least from the perspective of a consumer. If you want a portable USB-capable tablet, maybe you want a Surface Pro. That thing would be pretty awesome if someone can Linux it.

In any case, you can already use pretty much any Bluetooth keyboard you want, and there are a large number of third party ones to pick from.

Indeed. See my comment here though. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6973619

Much like typography can't be unseen, once you use good keyboards, anything but is maddening. The same goes for good UI.

I use Arch on an XPS. The fonts have been the most annoying thing. I'm considering switch to Wayland to get away from X fonts. The good side is some desktop managers (like all Gnome-derived ones) allow you to universally set the fonts. But if you don't use X you can't really go running Gnome every time you want to run a X application.

I would like a kind of font-wrapper for X. So it could be configured simply and just start bare bones X with the fonts all configured. Then XMonad would be a bit prettier.

(You can then install Heltevica et al. if that's what your into)

I tried Arch this year for the first time and I really liked it, but also encountered really crappy fonts. Not sure what gives there. On my Debian machine the fonts seem on par with my Mac (to my non-font-snob eyes, which were at least able to notice Arch's badness).

I'd say you don't have to abandon X to get decent fonts. I think the Arch defaults are just bad.

Arch doesn't do anything by default. That's the Arch way. You install what you need. There isn't anything precluding Arch in particular from having good fonts, you just have to know what fonts to install. I've just never found ones I liked. I recall in years past using Debian doing a lot of extra work after installing a package to get halfway-decent fonts, but they were still just halfway-decent fonts.

Well I think the issue may have been that everything was set up to use the old-style XLFDs instead of routing everything through freetype. Not sure when you are referring to (it's been a while since I've done a clean install of debian myself, I just move my install from disk to disk as the years and hardware pass), but AFAIK font support in X has been pretty good for about 10 years, and by now most distros have the newer stuff enabled without a lot of fuss.

Then again as I mentioned I am not a "font snob" - it's not very distinguishable to me, beyond the "old-style" (pre-freetype) stuff looking kind of bad; YMMV.

There are ways to make it more bearable for sure, but I haven't explored them in a long time. I think Wayland is still several years out for most people unless you really like Enlightenment, which I may give a try when E19 is out.

Firefox would need to work though.

> The one downside is that, on the occasions that I do use X, the fonts aren't very good. I wouldn't even begin to know how to approach making typography more Mac-like, but I'm okay with that. I spend 99% of my time in the console.

I guess this has something to do with patent issues, but I'm not sure. Although being a bit of a hack, you can get the Ubuntu font rendering with patched libraries from AUR (1). For me the Ubuntu font patches provide in every way very pleasant rendering. If you want to spend time fine tuning and even better rendering, you might want to try Infinality patches and configuration (2).

Use yaourt (3) instead of pacman for keeping the system up to date, and it takes care of the AUR packages also. Installing yaourt is the most annoying part here, but after that it's pretty straightforward.

1. https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Font_Configuration#Ubun...

2. https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Font_Configuration#Infi...

3. https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/yaourt

I like managing my AUR packages with pacman for some reason. I actually find it to be less trouble than dealing with yaourt.

I've looked into this for a brief moment but realized that I want to spend as little time in the GUI being unproductive as possible. I'd almost say that shitty X fonts are a feature for me right now -- the one time it was an actual problem motivated me to set up CUPS and get my laser printer working (btw, HP, f* you for your handling of Zjstream printers).

Good tip though. And yes, the patent issue doesn't help.