Linux font rendering is generally very good now, so I think they’ve gotten past that. Apart from a System76 desktop, which was terrible, I haven’t hated the rendering for many years. It’s just that Microsoft’s font rendering (maximizing clarity at the expense of destroying the font metrics) is exactly what I want to look at all day if I’m staring at code. When I look at screenshots of vscode on Linux and Mac the code looks beautiful, because the font renderer hasn’t beaten the characters with a big stick to make them fit the pixel grid, but when I switch back to windows after using Linux/Mac then it feels like someone fixed the focus and de-blurred everything.
And now that I can have as many Linux installs as I like running concurrently via WSL2, I get to use Linux all day without losing the stuff I like about Windows.
(Tweaked) Verdana FTW.
I liked proportional fonts for reading code - several of my favorite programming books used proportional fonts for code examples - so when Verdana was released in 1996 I switched to using it in my IDEs. I’ve had 27 years of pleasantly ergonomic coding - it has a high x-height, different 0/O, I/l/1, and impeccable hinting and kerning. ❤️❤️❤️