Well I just installed Linux Mint tonight as I really liked where the Project was going, it’s basically Ubuntu with some extra’s for the real Linux geeks.

The only problem with any (or most) new Linux installations is that the fonts are blurry and spacing is just off.. So I did some googling and found this thread on the Ubuntu forums, if you follow the 2 simple steps given you’re fonts will look a lot better..

Create a file called .fonts.conf in your home directory (vim ~/.fonts.conf) and paste in the following contents

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!DOCTYPE fontconfig SYSTEM "fonts.dtd">
<fontconfig>
  <match target="font">
    <edit name="autohint" mode="assign">
      <bool>true</bool>
    </edit>
  </match>
</fontconfig>

After that relog.

Apperantly the reason this isn’t done by default is because Apple has some patents on the techniques used to make this happen.. don’t you just hate patents..

Note that I’ve only tried it on Linux Mint 6 (based on Ubuntu 8.10), but I reckon it should work for most distro’s.. gonna try it tomorrow on Centos 4.7 at work.