Update 2015-09: Better yet, install Infinality. It makes font rendering pretty.
Switching back to Linux from Mac is still a process of ironing out minor wrinkles. Take, for example, this abomination (enlarged to show texture):—
… No, I’m not talking about Mr Paul’s antics (or the typo in the TP post, either), but the horrid non-matching ligatures (‘attack’, ‘flubbed’, ‘targeting’) in a sea of blocky text. Almost every programme I was running had this problem. Mouse over the image to see how it could look if you apply this easy fix.
Create (or edit) the file ~/.fonts.conf ~/.config/fontconfig/conf.d, and add the following lines:
<match target="font" >
<edit name="embeddedbitmap" mode="assign">
<bool>false</bool>
</edit>
</match>
Log out, log back in again, and text is properly pretty. Yay!