> Low DPI monitors are pretty much unusable since MacOS dropped subpixel rendering
Nonsense, fonts look fine on non-Retina monitors; they were fine on my old 24" 1920x1200 monitor and are fine on my new 27" 2560x1440 one. Can I see a difference if I drag window from the external monitor to the built-in Retina display? Yes, but text is not blurry at all on the external monitor.
If it matters, "Use font smoothing when available" is checked in System Preferences (which only appears to have an effect on the Retina display, not the monitor).
That's been my experience, too. I prefer high-DPI monitors, but back when I was going into the office (remember going into the office?) and connecting my MacBook to a 1920x1200 monitor, text was perfectly readable. I suppose if I had two low-DPI Macs, one running Catalina and one running, I don't know, High Sierra, I might be able to tell the difference at smaller font sizes,
As an aside, I wonder whether the article's explanation of how font hinting works -- I confess for all these years I didn't know the point of "hinting" was to make sure that fonts lined up with a rasterized grid! -- explains why I always found fonts to look a little worse on Windows than MacOS. Not less legible -- arguably hinted fonts are less "fuzzy" than non-hinted fonts on lower-resolution screens, which (I presume) is what people who prefer hinted fonts prefer about them -- but just a little off at smaller sizes. The answer is because they literally are off at smaller sizes.
These things are fairly subjective. But it’s hard to argue that Catalina has good font rendering on regular DPI screens. I dealt with it when I had to, but it was very poor. There are also tons of bugs around it. Like the chroma issue - Apple doesn’t support EDID correctly so fonts look even more terrible on some screens. A google search will confirm these problems.
Nonsense, fonts look fine on non-Retina monitors; they were fine on my old 24" 1920x1200 monitor and are fine on my new 27" 2560x1440 one. Can I see a difference if I drag window from the external monitor to the built-in Retina display? Yes, but text is not blurry at all on the external monitor.
If it matters, "Use font smoothing when available" is checked in System Preferences (which only appears to have an effect on the Retina display, not the monitor).