That's "normal". It's what happens when you render a scalable font with no antialiasing and it doesn't have proper hinting. Some fonts looked like that in the Win95 days too, though the default UI fonts were carefully and manually hinted to avoid that.
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Strangely, above a certain size it turns on antialiasing and then looks fine. E.g. one notch lower and this slider and the Tahoma sample looks awful. I wonder if it really is attempting to use the bitmap data?pic.twitter.com/gOmRkIj5te
Nah, that's not bitmap data. You can tell because nearest neighbor scaling doesn't look like that. Old Windows did the same thing, and only turned on antialiasing at larger sizes because otherwise small text was deemed to look too blurry. FWIW on my PC Wine AAs everything.
