OK so for the last few years I have been working for companies who let me choose between a mac and a pc and I worked almost exclusively on a Linux laptop. At the beginning of the month I joined a new company who is a bit more stricter in term of equipment choice and they basically provide windows or nothing. I have heard some people are using Linux but I haven't seen any official agreement allowing for this. And appart from the frustration of having to live with an ergonomically unfriendly subpar interface there is nothing blocking me in my day to day job so I have no incentive to do the renegade.
However there are 2 things that are bothering me a lot. First are the horrendous international keyboard layouts that are wrong and have never been fixed in more than 30years. This one is fixable as there are tool to convert xkb layouts to klc layouts and vice-versa, so I won't bother you with those. Second is the horrible font rendering on Windows. There are very little applications/fonts that look good, and they mostly look good when using large fonts and it looks worse and worse the smaller you set the font. It is especially annoying on a code editor. To be honest this used to be the weak point of Linux 20 years ago but it looks like microsoft has been standing still while Mac and Linux were improving the text rendering. I am not a specialist in that subject so I know very little why and it may very well be part of some resistance to change on my part. But you may want to look at those and decide which one you prefer.
Both screenshots were done using the very same monitor. I chose the same default fonts on the browser, there might be a difference in the scaling factor of the screen as the text doesn't seem to be the same size.
Anyway, any tip to improve font rendering? Are there third party tools that can improve that? I ran through the "Adjust ClearType text" wizard to set it the best I could but so far I am still seeing a difference disfavoring my professionnal laptop when putting it next to my personnal laptop running Fedora. Maybe the web is not the correct example as the css chosen might use some builtin font on windows which is not on linux, letting me fallback on a font that is better rendered? But I seem to be annoyed in other apps so I am not too sure.
Sounds weird to ask this on a cycling forum but I know there are some IT peoples around here so maybe someone has a clue.
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