If font rendering on Linux sucks then why fonts on Android look good?

10 points by xstartup ↗ HN
You can quickly google "font rendering on linux". But the fonts on Android seem to have no issue. What's the difference in font rendering between these two OS?

6 comments

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You know, as a long time Linux user, I've never thought about that. That's a good question.
You are confusing Linux distros and The GNU kernel.

Android is built on the GNU kernel like Linux, but does not share the same libraries and packages as Linux.

Android does not use the same graphics interface as Linux uses.

> You are confusing Linux distros and The GNU kernel.

> Android is built on the GNU kernel like Linux, but does not share the same libraries and packages as Linux.

That'd be Stallman's dream. But no, Linux is the kernel. Evil corporation has no plans to switch to GNU Hurd as far as I know (at least that's the case in the dimension I live in). And the packages that are used together with the Linux kernel are from GNU project (that's why those are called GNU/Linux distros).

Font rendering has kind of stopped sucking on Linux lately. There was this guy making a package called Infinality which majorly improved the appearance of most fonts on Linux. His patches has fiiiinally been pushed upstream to fontconfig and freetype2 themselves.

But that's not the major difference between Android and Linux -- it's the DPI. Mobile phone screens have about four times as many pixels/unit of area compared to regular 1920x1080 screens. Run Linux on a HiDPI screen and fonts will look just as good.

I think this depends on the app. I've only had problems with fonts on Linux on a few apps, most notably text editors ... of course ... and most notably of those JetBrains products (though I am a fan of their products otherwise).

There are things you can do in these situations to make things better. Right now I'm on Windows, though.

Had to do some Windows dev and it's easier to run a VM and connect my IDE to that from Windows rather than the other way around, at least in my experience :)