Worked through this video tutorial, which had some great hints for making nice fonts appear in Linux. Previously, I could only seem to get decent fonts in Ubuntu, and for other reasons (primarily Nutanix CVM is based on CentOS) I wanted to use CentOS as my desktop.
The two things which had most impact on font appearance were
- Adding font that claims to be same as used in OS-X
- Installing a tool named infinality, which improves randering.
- Using lxappearance to set the default font for all GTK based applications.
Both are described in the Tutorial
- Installing OS-X Fonts : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ARKIwOlazKI&t=130s
- Infinality Section : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ARKIwOlazKI&t=580s
Another nice idea from the series is to match, or at least give some thought to the Browser (Firefox) window manager (i3) and GTK “Themes”. The tutorial uses a single colorscheme across all elements to achieve a nice coherent look and feel. Doing so has given me the ability to customize/use a lightweight window manager, but still retain nice fonts in the applications, browser and Windowing environment.