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IMO, the real problem is font rendering characteristics emanating from FOSS systems. Bootup a basic fedora or debian system and what you will see fonts that are WIRY as all heck. Turning on subpixel rendering and hinting doesn't help enough, IMO. You can attack the problem with a font like Cantarell, which is nicer but also a real oddball. Or you can change your rendering to match a system like OSX using an out-of-date patch called 'infinality'... http://www.infinality.net/

Ubuntu, interestingly enough, seems to be an exception to this rule. Its rendering loses a lot of that wiry look. Its a significant improvement though still not quite as good as OSX or Windows. Its not surprising that infinality has a preset to emulate Ubuntu as well as other OSes.

Try changing your X font configuration with infinality. I certainly noticed a big improvement over the XFCE defaults after installing that package.

Fonts on Linux these days look better than Windows 7 (in my opinion) and on par or better than OSX. If you want to tweak to your hearts content (or just set an aesthetically pleasing default) then use Infinality.

I do believe that the patches from http://www.infinality.net/blog/infinality-freetype-patches/ are being slowly merged into freetype. In the meantime, use the infinality patches. They make a huge, huge difference.

Linux has the best looking fonts of any desktop. Also, you don't need the MS fonts, just use the liberation fonts instead.

RHEL is a great distribution for enterprise and servers but you might be better off with Fedora on the desktop if you're going to want nice fonts and such. Fedora is the community version of Red Hat, you'll find yourself at home there.

ClearType-like rendering for Linux exists: it's called Infinality patchset for FreeType. Screenshot (be sure to view at 100% zoom, and pay attention to small letters, that are usually botched pretty badly on vanilla FT).

That's supposed to be better? It looks absolutely terrible (and yes, I did view it at 100% zoom). Look at the 10pt Times New Roman on this screenshot – it's so blurry it is practically unreadable. This is really the best Linux has to offer? Again, the only open-source package I've seen that even comes close to acceptable font rendering is Anti-Grain Geometry, and it isn't currently part of Linux or any other larger project.

ClearType-like rendering for Linux exists: it's called Infinality patchset for FreeType. Screenshot (be sure to view at 100% zoom, and pay attention to small letters, that are usually botched pretty badly on vanilla FT).

The only problem is that I don't know any distro which has it out of the box. Arch is probably easiest to set it up on, because it has the package in AUR.

ClearType-like rendering for Linux exists: it's called Infinality patchset for FreeType. Screenshot (be sure to view at 100% zoom, and pay attention to small letters, that are usually botched pretty badly on vanilla FT).

The only problem is that I don't know any distro which has it out of the box. Arch is probably easiest to set it up on, because it has the package in AUR.