I use Windows at work for its killer feature I rarely see mentioned: text antialiasing and rendering.

I believe (?) Freetype came very close to Cleartype in Linux land, but MS holds patents on the extra bit that makes Cleartype just a bit better.

I assume text antialiasing will be unnecessary in 10 years due to the rising ubiquity of high resolution monitors, but that day is not here yet. I’ve noticed that macOS has just completely bailed on text antialiasing. Hooking up my MacBook Air M1 to my 109 DPI monitor is a truly awful experience. On the other hand, text on the Retina screen is holy grail. However, holy grail is unattainable for me at the moment. LG Ultrafine monitors are too expensive.

Due to DirectWrite, it’s very easy to get an end-to-end best-in-class GPU accelerated text rendering experience on Windows.