Indeed it is. A lot of wonderful work has went into FreeType and Pango. Linux font rendering went from the worst to (arguably, and when well-configured) one of the best.

I do hope that they don't go a few steps back in a case of "rewrite everything". Example of who did: Metro apps in Windows 8 no longer use ClearType (RGB subpixel rendering), but plain greyscale antialiasing. I believe many Desktop apps are falling back to it, too. It looks like pre-windows XP. It's easy to miss the correct flags as a developer, and many people don't care enough or don't have the eyes to see the difference, but it's annoying for those who do care.

Lets just hope that they get everything right with fonts with the switch from X to Wayland...

> Example of who did: Metro apps in Windows 8 no longer use ClearType (RGB subpixel rendering), but plain greyscale antialiasing.

That's a victim of mobile-optimized toolkits. RGB subpixel rendering doesn't work on GPU-accelerated UIs that are on devices that are rotated. As in, it's expected to have the subpixel ordering change semi-frequently, and that change needs to happen as fast as possible. Since all the text is cached in GPU textures, that would require tearing down the font caches and re-building them every time the user rotates. That's prohibitively expensive, which means no RGB-subpixel rendering.

On mobile devices this hasn't been an issue because raw density saves the day. Your average phone's pixels are smaller than your typical desktop/laptop's subpixels. Maybe some day desktop/laptop will get a density boost, maybe...

Or, you could render to greyscale texture at 3x resolution and then scale down the texture with subpixel precision when rendering on screen?

Subpixel smoothing requires vector outlines to get good results, so scaling a bitmap won't work in practice. More importantly, font rendering is optimised to a specific size, i.e. the bitmap for 32x32 isn't just a scaled version of the 16x16 bitmap. The usual mechanism for this is hinting, but some engines use their own heuristics (e.g. CoreText, and maybe Metro?).

I prefer grey scale on bigger fonts, and RGB on smaller fonts :p (Even have it configured like this). On the smaller fonts you "need" it, but on the bigger fonts you don't, so I prefer no coloured edges there. (Also depends on your screen quality of cours.-