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Comment by speedgoose | Hacker News Reader

I connect my Windows 10 thinkpad and my M1 macbook to the same old 1080p external screens, and I prefer the Windows 10 text rendering. The MacOS text rendering looks a bit bolder and a bit more blurry. On the laptops screen, the high pixel density hides the difference.

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It looks a bit more blurry because it _is_ a bit more blurry. As another commenter explained a little, Windows' font rendering attempts to 'cut off' at pixel boundaries for straight edges, making characters appear sharper. This is at the expense of being less true to the font design.

I used to prefer the Windows text rendering for this reason, but since so-called 'Retina' screens, everything looks the same to me.

Try

    defaults -currentHost write -g AppleFontSmoothing -int 0

on macOS. That will stop it from making every font more bold than it should be. Mentioned in https://tonsky.me/blog/monitors/

Agreed, on low-res screens, I actually prefer completely unaliased text rendering. It looks jagged and I like the kind of retro vibe it gives.

Yup. Apple fonts look good because they make them all nice and chonky which avoids all the technically correct hinting that preserves actual font shape but doesn’t look as nice in the end that Windows does.

I have a metric compatible clone of the SF Mono font installed on Windows. To get it to look the same as it does on macOS, I have to use the Medium weight to account for this.

Yup definitely agree with this. MacOS rendering is horrendous on normal monitors, it only looks good on 4k monitors, whereas Windows looks decent on everything.

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