Not really. Just learning about how to adjust preferences for FontConfig. Antialiasing, hinting and subpixel rendering have a lot of effect on the visual appearance especially. You can read about it here:

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Font_configuration#Font...

There can be also some monitor specific tweaks like LCD filtering.

More feature rich DEs give quite easy to use interfaces for managing all that (for example KDE). So if you are using some barebones DE / WM, then you should be ready to do all that manually in the config files.

The xml config files seems overly complex (I admit, I suffer from acute xml ad-formatem) for my tastes.

I tried to diff manjaro linux /etc/fontconfig actually, just to see what they were doing right to have such nice visuals and couldn't find anything.

It's in the same basket as some famous audio server, which I replaced by it's very naive ancestor.

About general idea of what all those settings are, here is a brief overview: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Font_rasterization

FontConfig rules can even be applied to Web fonts, which at times can be messed up by default. Example of such rule for fixing some mess on DuckDuckGo:

    <match target="font">
      <test name="family">
        <string>@font-face:DDG_ProximaNova</string>
      </test>
      <edit mode="assign" name="autohint">
        <bool>true</bool>
      </edit>
      <edit mode="assign" name="lcdfilter">
        <const>lcddefault</const>
      </edit>
    </match>

Without the rule: https://i.imgur.com/SsicEFJ.png

With the rule: https://i.imgur.com/Ehh0rZU.png

agreed ;)

I guess you haven't used Ubuntu lately, which ships with better fonts than my Windows machine.

Is not about font taste, is about brokenness, you can clearly see in the screenshot that the fonts are rendered poorly, some letters are lighter than others, half of a letter is lighter than the other half, some don't look smooth, etc...

Others have also mentioned that the subpixel order differs from monitor to monitor, so if the screenshot was taken on a monitor with BGR subpixels and your monitor has RGB subpixels, the text will look much, much, worse than if there had been no subpixel rendering at all. Or perhaps you, like me, have a CRT and subpixel rendering always looks wrong. It's hardly Firefox's fault.