The font rendering for Linux is terrible. Just look at Intellij IDEA in ubuntu for example.

It's a wonderful editor but I can't use it since it is almost not readable.

>> The font rendering for Linux is terrible.

Ubuntu fonts are great, which Linux are you talking about and is this recent as in the last 5 years experience or is it qualified non-sense on your part?

>> Just look at Intellij IDEA in ubuntu for example.

I have, I'm not impressed overall though on Ubuntu the fonts are fine. I stick with Eclipse because SWT was and is a brilliant idea, the widgets don't just look native, they _are_ native.

That bears repeating, with SWT, the widgets don't just look native, they _ARE_ native.

Swing does its own font rendering, so the fonts look wrong[0] on every platform.

[0] Where "wrong" means "different from what is expected on the platform" – until we get higher-resolution screens font rendering is a compromise between sharpness and correctness-of-shape; different platforms make different choices; users adjust to the specific choices their platform has made. To observe this in the wild, read any discussion of Safari on Windows.

FWIW this patch:

http://www.infinality.net/blog/infinality-freetype-patches/

https://launchpad.net/~no1wantdthisname/+archive/openjdk-fon...

Makes IntelliJ fonts actually look good on Linux. It's unbelievable how much better they look, and why no one has fixed this before.

I might actually switch to IntelliJ now.

This is a real problem one thing worth trying is Terminus at 16/12pt it's a pixel perfect font created as a TTF so requires no aliasing etc.

Completely solved the issue for me.