I personally greatly prefer Windows style font rendering (presumably #2). Fortunately Ubuntu is flexible enough that I can configure it for Windows style font smoothing.

For better comparison, here is Windows with ClearType switched on (#2):

http://alteredqualia.com/visualization/hn/font-cleartype.png

1) OS X

2) Windows (XP I think...)

3) Ubuntu

I may have transposed OS X and Ubuntu though...

1) OS X. A tad fuzzy, but everything is rendered _accurately_. Consistent thickness and character tracking (spacing).

2) Windows. Everything is slammed into pixel boundaries, making it look clean. Verdana is optimized for this style of rendering, so it doesn't look terrible.. but it's definitely not accurate.

3) Ubuntu. Worst of both worlds. Fuzzy and inaccurate.

I am honestly having a hard time believing someone with decent eyesite can say ubuntu(3) is fuzzy while osx(1) is not,

ubuntu obviously chooses sharpness over balance (H and E), however osx has virtually every lowercase character heavily aliased, its blurry to the point where its almost 2 shades lighter than its supposed to be and there are individual characters A, u, B, a where it is almost a joke

I absolutely admit that OS X has a somewhat fuzzy appearance, particularly at small point sizes. This gets exaggerated with the MS Core/Web fonts, which were designed for the screen (stems that line up with pixel boundaries, etc), and have hinting that is specifically designed to be compatible with MS ClearType.

Ubuntu has similar (but not exactly the same) levels of fuzziness, but the rendering is inaccurate. Character tracking/spacing is the biggest issue, but there are others.

If you look at traditional fonts that are designed for print or general purpose use (e.g. Helvetica, Frutiger, Univers, Myriad, etc.), the accuracy and quality of OS X rendering stands out considerably. There is simply no comparison.. and once you get used to it, the small amount of "fuzziness" that you observe in small point sizes just doesn't bother you anymore.

its kerning not tracking, and its only off in a few minor places (for the same reason the midline is off in H E), in those paragraphs I can find around the same mistakes from both the renders around the kerning (both make pretty identical errors)

I use osx every day, I am very used to it, I just prefer ubuntus rendering by quite a long way

OS X has the glyphs clipped to an imaginary sub-screen-resolution grid. The same letter may in some instances take up one black pixel and in others take up two (and be greyish in both). That's what he meant by accuracy. On linux every identical glyph is rendered identically, no matter where it is positioned.

That's funny, I didn't know Verdana was optimized for that type of rendering.

I use Ubuntu configured to use Windows style hinting without sub-pixel smoothing, and I have absolutely every font forced to Verdana. I'm glad that there is accidentally a little bit of logic behind my choice.