Comment 10 for bug 210921

Well, first, you're using a commercial font for comparison, which renders particularly well with slight hinting, other fonts do not fare as well. Also, are you using a non-standard size as well? 9pt?

I've attached a comparison using the default font in Ubuntu 'sans', which is aliased to DejaVu Sans if I'm not mistaken. The font here is also at it's default size 10pt.

With Slight hinting DejaVu Sans looks fat and fuzzy, and with full hinting it looks crystal clear, with no overlapping characters. Well the ffi are touching, but those letters are intentionally kerned in a cozy way, to more or less emulate a ligature...