After years of developing on Windows (.NET) I kept hearing about all these new kids on the block using Ruby and Python. Since I wanted to try them I thought it would be nice to check out Linux at the same time. I heard a lot about Ubuntu so I am running Ubuntu 10.04 with VMware.
Everything worked supprisingly well and I didn't have any big problems until I tried browsing some webpages with Ubuntu. It feels like I am browsing the web without my glasses or that I am back on my old CRT monitor.
Example 1
This is Windows Chrome vs Ubuntu Chrome. As you can see the Linux version is a little more blurry and the AA isn't that crisp. I did search Google a bit and found a lot of posts that said to edit the fonts.conf
file but that doesn't seem to change anything. I also tried changing the rendering modes (Monochrome, Best shapes, Best contrast and Subpixel smoothing) but that didn't help either.
Since I might be doing some web development with Linux in the future it's fairly important to me that the fonts look the same as in Windows.
Example 2
I'm not sure that this example has anything to do with AA - it seems that the font is just smaller on Linux.
Edit: I remember reading that Safari had font problems too. I found these two blog posts:
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2007/06/whats-wrong-with-apples-font-rendering.html
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2007/06/font-rendering-respecting-the-pixel-grid.html
I wonder if Ubuntu is 'respecting' the grid as well and if I can turn this off.