I tried different font settings in the font settings and it didn’t improve much (font hinting, anti aliasing, custom DPI settings, different font size)
The font is the default one which is Ubuntu Regular with font size set to 10
Sub pixel order is set properly to RGB Linux Mint xfce
Even when running windows in a virtual machine, the font rendering in it is miles ahead of what I got on my Linux setup!!!
Can we see some screenshots? It’s hard to work just with someone’s idea of “better”. Not to mention that font rendering can be tweaked on both Windows and Linux and we don’t know what settings you’ve changed so far. Oh and I hope you’re comparing the same font otherwise there isn’t much point you the comparison.
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
The biggest problem that I see on this screenshot is that it is a compressed JPEG.
You will never get the same font rendering on Linux as on Windows as Windows font rendering (ClearType) is very strange, complicated and covered by patents.
Font rendering is also kind of a subjective thing. To anyone who is used macOS, windows font rendering looks wrong as well. Apple’s font rendering renders fonts much closer to how they would look printed out. Windows tries to increase readability by reducing blurriness and aligning everything perfectly with pixels, but it does this at the expense of accuracy.
Linux’s font rendering tends to be a bit behind, but is likely to be more similar to macOS than to Windows rendering as time goes forward. The fonts themselves are often made available by Microsoft for using on different systems, it’s just the rendering that is different.
For me, on my screens just by installing Segoe UI and tweaking the hinting / antialiasing under GNOME settings makes it really close to what Windows delivers. The default Ubuntu font, Cantarell and Sans don’t seem to be very good fonts for a great rendering experience.
The following links may be of interest to you:
There are some tips here that might help
https://github.com/dajeed/arch-linux-font-improvement-guide
Important to note that restarting or running
sudo fc-cache -fv
is key when doing things with fonts.