I’m pretty sure I understand almost everything there is to understand in terms of font configuration on Linux. While configuration is a mess (qt settings, xft settings, xrdb settings, fontconfig settings, gnome settings), the even more frustrating part is that even if you understand all this settings, the result you can get out of it is still not that great.
It turns out MS has put a huge amount of time into making fonts look good on low-res displays. This comes in the form of TrueType hinting, as well as the ClearType rendering method. While the most recent Ubuntu release has both of these partially implemented, the output still does not match the quality found on XP or Vista. (and XP is how many years old?)
But if you step back a bit, you just realize that this is a really hard problem. The fact that there is a whole interpreter infrastructure just to help you render fonts on low-DPI displays is evidence of this.
But how did things end up this way? I tend to think that it’s because of MS’s emphasis on backwards compatibility, and the fact that their original API’s were not resolution independent. In combination, this means that even on a brand spanking new computer, if you run old code and at the same time try to set the DPI really high, you get bad results.
But the real point I’m trying to make is that support for high-DPI gui’s might be a way competitors can displace Microsoft on the desktop. Both Apple and Linux have a smaller set of legacy apps, and also have better architectures for possibly supporting DPI scaling, even for older apps. While new Windows technologies like WPF have DPI-scaling built in, as long as commonly used apps aren’t ported over, the DPI problem will continue to exist on the Windows desktop. Apple could conceivably transition most of their own programs over in a few releases. Linux might take a bit longer, but the core pieces are already there (automatic layout of GUI’s and technologies such as SVG that enable the smooth scaling of bitmaps and the like). In fact, I’d wager that even today, you can probably get a better experience on Linux using a 200 DPI display then you could on windows, just due to the extra configurability.
Supporting high DPI displays also gets around one of Linux’s main problems. When the resolution increases, technologies like TrueType hinting and ClearType become irrelevant. Font rendering becomes relatively simple and — at a high enough DPI — better than anything ClearType can produce at lower DPI’s. This could be an area where Linux’s flexibility could lead it to bring a much awaited technology to masses, faster than Windows can, and in the process win over a few converts.
Of course, given the way things go, Apple will probably get there first.