So, this has been kind of my obsession these past years using openSUSE – I couldn’t get the fonts to be gently hinted in the way I want them to be. Every patch or repo had an issue with displaying a specific group of fonts. Now I finally found a way to get my fonts to look like this:

I achieved it by conducting these steps:

1) Open yast and click on Software Repositories

2) Click ‘Add’ and select to specify location of the repositories

3) Insert this link. It’s a repository with the most up-to-date libfreetype6 by nick31.

4) Go to software management and use a vendor change, to change all the packages to the ones used in this repository.

Now, this should do it by itself, but somehow, some fonts were still displaying awkwardly. So I guessed (correctly it seems) it has something to do with config files in /etc/fonts. So to get perfect font rendering (like in Ubuntu or Debian 8 – if you’re looking for something similar), you can perform these steps:

1) Download the config files here.

2) Extract them and replace the whole /etc/fonts folder with the one you downloaded.

3) Go to system settings, edit app apearance, enable font hinting and set the values to RGB, and slight hinting.

4) Log out, log back in. Kaboom. Fonts look marvellous.

Disclaimer: I’m not actually sure if changing the config files in /etc/fonts will have any side effects. A week or so in, the only side effect I’ve ‘suffered’ is having great font rendering, which makes using my geeko machine an even greater pleasure than it already was. Don’t perform this task, unless you know what you’re doing.

…have a lot of fun!