I've been using Ubuntu since 7.04 and I'm still using it in virtual machine now. I agree that esp. for 8.x Ubuntu really beats XP on font rendering (well, except for OpenOffice and occasionally Firefox).
However both Windows and Linux still have very far way to go to beat Apple's font rendering engine. Apple just needs to get the font right because otherwise it cannot sell so many Macs to designers. And they did.
I remembered I was seduced by the Ruby guys' screenshot of Monaco font in TextMate. In my opinion Monaco is probably the best ever designed monospace font for programmers. Well, of coz it must be rendered by Apple's font engine to get the right look -- tried Monaco both on XP and Ubuntu and it sucked big.
I have to face code more than half of the day, and thus a good Monospace font is very important to me. On Ubuntu I think Bitstream/Dejavu Mono is the best, and on Windows I prefer Consolas, but both look kinda unpolished compared to Monaco on Mac.
No, I'm not talking about those cool design fonts. I'm talking about the basic typefaces like Times, Helvetica, etc. I think probably fonts are the area where commercial companies do better than open source --- fine-tuning a font requires so much time and energy of artists which I think is a very very scarce resource in the open source community. It also explains why a good set of typefaces costs big bucks. Sad, but true ...
However both Windows and Linux still have very far way to go to beat Apple's font rendering engine. Apple just needs to get the font right because otherwise it cannot sell so many Macs to designers. And they did.
I remembered I was seduced by the Ruby guys' screenshot of Monaco font in TextMate. In my opinion Monaco is probably the best ever designed monospace font for programmers. Well, of coz it must be rendered by Apple's font engine to get the right look -- tried Monaco both on XP and Ubuntu and it sucked big.
I have to face code more than half of the day, and thus a good Monospace font is very important to me. On Ubuntu I think Bitstream/Dejavu Mono is the best, and on Windows I prefer Consolas, but both look kinda unpolished compared to Monaco on Mac.
No, I'm not talking about those cool design fonts. I'm talking about the basic typefaces like Times, Helvetica, etc. I think probably fonts are the area where commercial companies do better than open source --- fine-tuning a font requires so much time and energy of artists which I think is a very very scarce resource in the open source community. It also explains why a good set of typefaces costs big bucks. Sad, but true ...