Comment by kccqzy
5 days ago
This might have been a good example fifteen years ago. These days with high-DPI displays you can't perceive a difference between font smoothing being turned on and off. On macOS for example font smoothing adds some faux bold to the fonts, and it's long been recommended to turn it off. See for example the influential article https://tonsky.me/blog/monitors/ which explains that font smoothing used to do subpixel antialiasing, but the whole feature was removed in 2018. It also explains that this checkbox doesn't even control regular grayscale antialiasing, and I'm guessing it's because downscaling a rendered @2x framebuffer down to the physical resolution inherently introduces antialiasing.
Maybe true for Mac users, but the average Win 10 desktop is still using a 1080p monitor.
The users may have 1080p monitors, but even Windows does not do subpixel antialiasing in its new apps (UWP/WinUI) anymore. On Linux, GTK4 does not do subpixel antialiasing anymore.
The reason is mostly that it is too hard to make it work under transformations and compositing, while higher resolution screens are a better solution for anyone who cares enough.
> even Windows does not do subpixel antialiasing in its new apps (UWP/WinUI) anymore
This is a little misleading, as the new versions of Edge and Windows Terminal do use subpixel antialiasing.
What Microsoft did was remove the feature on a system level, and leave implementation up to individual apps.
Is this why font rendering on my Win11 laptop looks like shit on my 1440p external monitor?
Laptop screen is 4k with 200% scaling.
Seriously the font rendering in certain areas (i.e. windows notification panel) is actually dogshit. If I turn off the 200% scaling on the laptop screen then reboot it looks correct again.