Set hinting to slight and subpixel rendering to RGB. This should already be the default on every possible combination of configurations you named except Fedora GNOME. Then yoink all the Windows fonts from a Windows ISO as you can find on the Arch wiki. FreeType is always gamma incorrect but that's the default on ClearType anyway so it should match. Pretentious text rendering fags never want to admit that your choice of settings and your choice of typefaces are not actually independent from each other, so you have to use Microsoft fonts for Microsoft text rendering. Famously Comic Sans looks quite good on a 640x480 display with no subpixel rendering. Almost like solutions to problems are engineered to solve those problems and not different ones.

>>106521447
I'm not that technical, so I'm not sure if I already did what you said, but here's what I tried to do to fix fonts on my current linux install of Fedora Workstation 42 (GNOME). I downloaded GNOME Tweaks and set hinting to slight and subpixel rendering to RGB. After that I downloaded Microsoft Fonts from here: https://mscorefonts2.sourceforge.net/
Then I restarted the computer and went into Firefox settings and made sure it's using the default fonts it uses on windows, New Times, Arial, etc, and set lowest font size allowed to 13, everything like defaults on Windows. Problem is it still somehow looks slightly worse than Firefox on Windows, which I usually "fix" by using betterfox github tweaks listed here under "FONT APPEARANCE" section
https://github.com/yokoffing/Betterfox/blob/main/Peskyfox.js
Firefox without these changes strains my eyes too much on Windows too, and it's the same with using Blender or GIMP, which makes me think that they might be using the same default text rendering Firefox or Linux uses without proprietary stuff that Windows has. Is there any way to make these tweaks inside firefox on linux? I tried to apply them but they seem to work only on windows, as in they don't even show up in about:config in linux and adding them manually seems to do nothing at all

>>106521512
>Microsoft Fonts from here: https://mscorefonts2.sourceforge.net/
No no no no no no no. These are old, very broken versions of only like 10 fonts from the late 90s. You have to get proper modern versions of everything from a Windows ISO. https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Microsoft_fonts#Extracting_fonts_from_a_Windows_ISO
I don't really blame you for fucking this up, stack overflow, and AI don't understand the difference.
>Firefox
I haven't used Firefox in a long time but if I recall some of the defaults for using serif or sans serif differ between Windows and Linux. You might want to check those too. Also I vaguely recall something about the math font settings being hard to get to if you also care about those.

I kind of missed that you're trying to match Firefox to Chrome, I originally thought you were using Chrome on Linux too. Chrome does its own text rendering using different gamma to make skinny fonts a little thicker so you might need to enable stem darkening to get a comparable effect on Firefox. But I'm not super sure how using a high DPI display affects that either

>>106521552
Damn arch wiki is useful as fuck, I think I'll just go ahead and dedicate a day to installing Arch properly and setting up fonts and shit using arch wiki. Maybe this fixes my issues since it seems they say the old fonts don't have proper hinting which is probably what makes them look so blurry and jaggy on sites. I hope this shit fixes it because text rendering has been practically the only issue keeping me from moving to linux full time. Would these fonts also fix Chromium text rendering in browsers and stuff like Steam? I don't mind using some foss chromium browser like Chromium or Brave, but without any font changes they don't render text properly for me either rn. The most annoying part is how clear and crisp text looks in linux native programs, like using KDE or GNOME and everything looks so nice out of the box, but if I download a browser or steam it just looks like dogshit. Annoying as fuck

>>106521604
As long as the programs can find your fonts they have the opportunity to use them, although I'm not sure whether something like steam would try to. Remember that programs aren't expecting you to have them on Linux so they might hard-code something else. Although generally fonts don't get hard-coded on Linux they just trust fontconfig which ironically causes other bugs but I digress. I put all the Windows fonts in ~/.local/fonts. Everywhere on the internet says you have to re-generate your fontconfig cache after this but as far as I can tell that's not true it just starts to work.
>The most annoying part is how clear and crisp text looks in linux native programs, like using KDE or GNOME and everything looks so nice out of the box, but if I download a browser or steam it just looks like dogshit.
That mostly shouldn't be the case, common distros I know of set their system fonts to be your preferred serif/sans serif/mono fonts. So on e.g. KDE you should mostly see Noto fonts everywhere. If you have Liberation Fonts installed, get rid of them, they're probably being aliased to Arial and TNR in your distro config.