So I upgraded from Ubuntu 23.04 to 23.10 and promptly noticed certain web fonts looking like utter trash. I’ve been able to identify at least Tahoma is affected, and this is a related other reddit thread that helped me down this rabbit hole (let me tell you there’s like no resources on this at all!).

Turns out WINE is the culprit, and something about 23.10 changed the nature of the fonts.

I was able to identify Tahoma is at least one culprit with the developer tools. Going to an example CSGO/CS2 subreddit discussion thread I noticed the comments in that thread look like trash, and it’s probably due to the styling of the subreddit. Hitting F12 and inspecting the styling for the text I noticed the font familys listed, and disabled one at a time (within my local browser session). Disabling Tahoma instantly made it look actually respectable as a font render.

So where is this damn font? checking the “Fonts” app, as well as that earlier aforementioned reddit thread, I find two Tahoma fonts located at “/usr/share/fonts/truetype/wine”. Changing their extension from “.ttf” to “ttf-bak” seems to not make them unaffected so I’m probably going to have to delete or move them to another folder.

Anyways for any other people experiencing this, this is a thing, and supposedly this font issue topic has been going on since 2011 or even earlier. Maybe now the WINE devs can actually take accountability for their font implementation decisions, but we’ll see. Frankly WINE making these fonts system wide and then resulting in rendering problems is just stupid. But that’s what I read of the situation so far, and I have rather limited information on this whole thing.

edit:

edit2:

Removing “fonts-wine” seems to have done the trick (and then rebooting), but not yet sure if that’s going to mess with games or not. We’ll see! :) Websites now look like not-trash yay!