Font rendering is a matter of taste. However, I personally think Ubuntu's default font rendering is the most eye-pleasing one of the whole Linux eco-system. And if a website's CSS font stack is looking good on Ubuntu, you can be relatively sure that it also works for Mac or MS Windows as long as the used fonts are available on these platforms. It is not hard to get the same font rendering on Fedora. This text is just a bit longer than a few commands because I try to provide additional background information and useful web-search-keywords which you may need if you have other targets than a 100% Ubuntu-like rendering.

To achieve the desired result, you have to know which parameters exist and how to change them. The most important things are:

Resolution ( DPI ).

Font hinting and the used font hinting method.

Font rasterization . Especially the used anti-aliasing method and its strength.

The used font rendering engine. The one shipped with Fedora comes without subpixel rendering (more on this later).

So let's look at the defaults applied on Ubuntu 10.10. You can do this on the terminal with xrdb -query :

Xft.dpi: 96 Xft.antialias: 1 Xft.hinting: 1 Xft.hintstyle: hintslight Xft.rgba: rgb Xft.lcdfilter: lcddefault

As you can see, Ubuntu is using RGB anti-aliasing with subpixel rendering (lcd-default means “subpixel (LCD)” method) and slight font hinting. Now compare this with the default values on Fedora 15 Lovelock:

Xft.antialias: 1 Xft.dpi: 96 Xft.hinting: 1 Xft.hintstyle: hintmedium Xft.rgba: none

This shows that Fedora does use grayscale anti-aliasing, a stronger font hinting style and no subpixel rendering by default. This is the reason why the same fonts look different on Fedora and Ubuntu.