I saw the issues you describe when I was running Safari – the font handling in that is disgusting in my opinion, but every other app is crystal clear. Very strange!

I googled this issue (because the difference between the screenshots you showed in the review and the fonts I’m seeing is HUGE) and it seems you’re not alone in having blurry fonts – some people have solved it with tweaking, some haven’t, but I do agree that it’s something that shouldn’t need to be tweaked. Especially since you’re running decently modern hardware.

The graphics card’s a Geforce 9600, so hopefully it’s not too weak to display a bit of text

(Isn’t anti-aliasing and subpixel hinting CPU-bound anyhow?)

I don’t think anything really went wrong when I reviewed this, the fonts still look just as bad as in the screenshots today. I’ve also seen them look the same way on coworkers’ machines, so I’m sure that’s intentional.

I’m not defending the OS because I like the way Microsoft does business. There’s a lot about their software and their commercial practices that I dislike (not least having to ring them twice in the space of a week because my husband’s computer suffered two catastrophic hardware failures and their system couldn’t believe anyone would do two rebuilds in such a short space of time). I do feel compelled to defend the OS’s text displaying, and editor, though. I’m not sure what went wrong for the original reviewer, but that stuff works fine over here.

I’m not averse to learning new UI if it offers me significant extra functionality and/or ease of use. In my opinion Vista/Win7 doesn’t do that.

Mind you – the Ubuntu 9.04 -> 9.10 live update thing seems to have given up the ghost so FOSS aint doing to well atm. wither. Think it might be a good time to try the new Chakra distro which is a KDE-desktopped version of the lovely lightweight Arch Linux distro.

Who knows… it might be good

The advantage of pre-packaged software for Joe Sixpack is that the stuff just works, and it is updated along with his operating system if he does an upgrade (which also just take a click or two), so he won’t run the risk of having old software that won’t work on his current system.

You are assuming the old ways of software distribution stick around forever, with people dragging home cardboard boxes containing plastic boxes containing plastic discs that they stick into an optical reader at home. This isn’t set in stone any more than music distribution on big old vinyl discs was.

I’m not sure if you read the entire article, I wasn’t angry; the text is more on the boring side than angry or exciting. I’m a bit sad that even when you are as level-headed and objective as possible, some people will still call you a zealot, a fanboi or a preacher. I’m not making any subjective claims apart from the UI design ones, and even those you could run by an interaction designer to get a proper semi-scientific opinion.