[Lorkki]

Apple have always preferred preserving letter forms over hinting, so Macs are therefore also "blurry" on lower DPI displays. The reason they aren't these days is because the DPI is higher.

Usually when people complain about this, the comparison is to Windows, which prefers strong hinting, i.e. snapping the font shapes to within (sub)pixel boundaries.

There also used to be patent encumbrance issues around subpixel rendering, making Linux font rendering on TFTs overall worse by default, but as of 2019 those have expired. Some distributions had already enabled those features anyway.

[zozbot234]

With any reasonable resolution screen (1080p or more), you can have both good preservation of letter forms and a non-blurry image, simply by applying a sharpening filter after antialiasing. Some image downsampling methods, such as Lanczos filtering, effectively do this for you. The tradeoff is one can detect some very fine 'ringing' artifacts around the sharpened transitions, but these don't impact readability in any way.