Likely broken font configuration with applications using different versions of the font rendering dependencies. If that's the official Chrome package, these dependencies are bundled and will be different than the OS versions. Most distributions link the system ones for Chromium.
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gist.github.com/thestinger/767 in ~/.config/fontconfig/fonts.conf is a reasonable default configuration. Important to note that hintfull is no longer properly supported in the current font rendering stack and auto-hinting has always been prone to very weird issues depending on fonts.
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Interesting... any idea why Firefox is totally fine tho?
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No, but it's quite possible one of them is respecting settings from something like GTK or GNOME configuration and the other is ignoring them.
Chromium and Firefox both have quirky desktop Linux integration because there's no standard way to do a lot of the things they want.
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From my digging into this, Firefox is better at respecting the actual font configuration, but this causes other problems in some cases where distro maintainers ship broken font configurations from ChromeOS:
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Here's another example of distro's just shipping wildly broken font configuration files:
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That specific example is definitely a user configuration change since github.com/archlinux/svnt ships an unmodified upstream configuration.
In general, Arch doesn't apply patches or configuration changes and installing stuff doesn't automatically start running services, etc.
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Main reason I use not just on my workstations but on all the GrapheneOS servers is because I don't have to spend time debugging downstream changes.
Does mean when upstream doesn't have good defaults, it's all on you to figure out how to set things up properly. I prefer that.
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One thing that's worth doing for everyone is running `fc-match sans`, `fc-match sans-serif` and `fc-match monospace` and making sure those are 3 high quality fonts you personally like. Also nice to get rid of as much as possible so you fall back to those as often as possible.
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Removing en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_font if your distribution provides it is crucial since they're ancient, terrible variants of the fonts.
Even modern variants don't render properly on Linux since they gave up on chasing full ClearType support and Microsoft built newer fonts around it.
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I'm perfectly happy installing Source Sans Pro / Source Serif Pro / Source Code Pro and using gist.github.com/thestinger/d9d.
Linux font rendering peaked when the perfectionist working on Infinality was around with their complex patches and configurations but it all bitrotted away.
