How to improve font rendering on Linux

In the last few years the Linux ecosystem has made a huge progress in term of quality of its desktop interface (or interfaceS since there are many alternatives) and it is almost at par with its commercial competitors. But it doesn’t mean that there aren’t any tweaks that still need to be implemented from time to time.
Today we deal with the installation of Infinality, a patched version of FontConfig that has been created to improve the visual rendering of any text font.

If you are using Red Hat, Fedora, or any derivates, use the following commands:
sudo rpm -Uvh https://www.infinality.net/fedora/linux/infinality-repo-1.0-1.noarch.rpm
sudo yum install freetype-infinality fontconfig-infinality

For Debian, Ubuntu, or any derivates, use the following commands:
echo “deb https://ppa.launchpad.net/no1wantdthisname/ppa/ubuntu raring main” | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/infinality.list
echo “deb-src https://ppa.launchpad.net/no1wantdthisname/ppa/ubuntu raring main” | sudo tee -a /etc/apt/sources.list.d/infinality.list
sudo apt-key adv –keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com –recv-keys E985B27B
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade
sudo apt-get install fontconfig-infinality

For Gentoo the package is included in the main repository so you need to use just the following commands:
emerge --ask media-libs/fontconfig-infinality
The only thing is that you may need to put the following line in /etc/portage/package.use:
media-libs/freetype infinality
Once installed, restart the system to implement the changes.

Marco Di Fresco