Definitely very subjective. People keep saying macOS has amazing font rendering but for me it just looks like a blurry mess, especially on non-retina displays. My fonts are set to be as sharp as possible on Linux because when coding and in the terminal I want very sharp fonts so they're easier to read for me.

Seconding the dependence on the particular font as well. Cantarell, Ubuntu and OpenSans are all fairly blurry regardless, unless seen on HiDPI screens in which case they do look more like macOS. DejaVu Sans can be very sharp in contrast at very low resolutions because it's been made in the 800x600 and 1024x768 days and optimized to look sharp when small.

I'm partial to macOS and I agree, I think Windows font rendering looks like garbage. On GNOME, I've found things to be okay. Sucks that patents are involved in this mess

Windows and Mac rendering have always been ugly as sin to me and I vastly prefer Linux font displays. They always look cleaner and less processed.

Thanks a lot for the info! I just went and installed segoe Ui font, and it looked even worse than Ubuntu Regular and I tried all the hinting options and made sure to restart after each change!!!

And also show ls -l /etc/fonts/conf.d

I tried to upload a screenshot when creating this post, but it seems there is an issue with the instance I'm on, so I just tried uploading it to Imgur instead so here you go, and oh scaling is set to 1x (there is only 1x which is the default and 2x which I tried today, but it made all the UI elements and text too big and yep I'm not using the same fonts for comparison and I don't think it is as simple to install and use the font used by win 10 and/or 11, and honestly I do not know if using Microsoft font going to fix this issue or not

screenshot these all are the default settings except maybe for Hinting

I'm running linux mint xfce which after checking it seems that it uses xfwm 4.18.0 and everything is blury, there isn't a single thing that isn't blury well except for the windows 10 vm lol

Font rendering is complex and depends on several settings and features lining up perfectly. Anti-aliasing, DPI, fractional scaling, hinting, and subpixel rendering are all important factors that contribute to the quality and appearance of text on a digital display.

Apparently nothing just get a 10 year old laptop and use Linux mint on it🤷‍♂️

Idk but I forgot to mention that now the laptop actually wakes up from sleep after I switched to the OS drivers, those proprietary drivers are really bad, god I shouldn't have switched to them at all.

Inter is great, I've been using it (TTF hinted) as my UI font for years and it renders very sharply. I'm on Debian and KDE Plasma

It's not made by Google though, it's this guy, Rasmus Andersson

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/font_configuration#Hinting

This is a correct recommendation, however in Debian-based distros you don't need to edit configuration files manually. Just pick some of preinstalled configs. They are installed in /usr/share/fontconfig/conf.avail and symlinked to /etc/fonts/conf.d.

Very old Toshiba laptop with a very old Nvidia gpu GT 525M running proprietary drivers connected to a 1080p monitor and yes it is running at 1080p

Maybe because of the old Nvidia gpu, hmm will try the OS drivers hope it helps,

Update: didn't help but it did fix an issue with the flatpak version of telegram (openGL) and wine is no longer complaining about something that's broken with the proprietary driver + the boot and shutdown animation now actually runs (which is Linux mint logo)