Myths have a very long half-life, especially when it has to do with operating systems. Let’s say version N of some software was really bad at doing something, which got fixed in version (N + 2). It won’t be until version (N + 5) or so that most people will realize that the problem has been fixed. Until then, this will remain a hot topic for discus­sion each time the subject comes up.

You know what the best part is? Not one of these people would have used any version of the OS for the past five years. For instance, a typical complaint would go like this: “I used Linux (read, Red Hat Linux 7, from the Dark Ages) sometime ago (read, six years ago) and the screen resolu­tion sucked!” Obeying the rules of gossip, this gets trans­lated into, “The resolu­tion on Linux sucks!”

Unfor­tu­nately, everyone not using Linux will continue to believe this myth until someone demon­strates that the screen resolu­tion on Linux is actually awesome. Note that it is insuf­fi­cient to demon­strate that the screen resolu­tion on Linux is as good as that on any other system. That’s just too mundane to catch on.

This phenom­enon works all six ways (Linux, Windows, Mac = factorial(3)). Windows and Mac being more ‘mainstream’, however, their features and releases receive greater publicity.

It is inter­esting how these different groups interact with each other, almost as if they were following their own religion. Blind faith, super­sti­tion — it has all the elements except physical violence. Maybe one of these days, govern­ments will force their citizens to use one or the other piece of software. Then, countries will go to war over operating systems.

If you install Linux for the first time and are greeted with an ugly set of fonts -

1. Make sure you install all the popular TrueType fonts (Microsoft’s common fonts are gener­ally avail­able via your distribution’s repositories).
2. Remember to enable anti-aliasing of fonts. Anti-aliasing can be turned on through the desktop-environment’s config­u­ra­tion, for example, KDE’s Control Center.
3. Set the hinting to ‘medium’ while enabling anti-aliasing of fonts.
4. Change the user-interface fonts to something that looks good, like Verdana, DejaVu or Calibri. Firefox also comes with an ugly set of default fonts, so you may also want to change those defaults too.