Yeah, I'm happy with my Linux font rendering for sure, and I would say generally it's more Apple-esque, so some reasonably large degree of this is just opinion and preference.
There was definitely a time when, to get good results, you had to do a lot more tweaking, setting things in fontconfig, using patched Freetype, but I don't really experience that anymore now for quite some time. I do still bring around a fonts.conf to my machines basically out of habit... the only relevant thing it does now probably is disable embedded bitmaps.
It's always a little bit of whiplash seeing how different this very site looks when I occasionally am on a Windows machine, with Verdana rendering quite differently there, and to my mind, worse.
There was definitely a time when, to get good results, you had to do a lot more tweaking, setting things in fontconfig, using patched Freetype, but I don't really experience that anymore now for quite some time. I do still bring around a fonts.conf to my machines basically out of habit... the only relevant thing it does now probably is disable embedded bitmaps.
It's always a little bit of whiplash seeing how different this very site looks when I occasionally am on a Windows machine, with Verdana rendering quite differently there, and to my mind, worse.