Vscode: Bad font rendering on linux

[searene]

• VSCode Version: 1.8.1
• OS Version: ubuntu 16.10

The font rendering on VSCode is pretty bad on linux. To find out the reason, I downloaded a simple electron app from electron-quick-start and found out that the font rendering on it was pretty good, this small electron app used the following components:

• Node.js 6.5.0
• Chromium 53.0.2785.143
• Electron 1.4.15.

Screenshots(font: ubuntu):

VSCode

electron

Maybe this is not so obvious, but in my computer the font rendering in electron is a lot better than VSCode. Everything on the editor seems to be blurry in VSCode.

[bpasero]

@searene does it make any difference if you change the editor font?

@alexandrudima fyi not sure if you know about more options to configure this.

One idea is also to run "code --disable-gpu" to see if that makes a difference.

[searene]

@bpasero No, almost each font is rendered badly. And I think it's so obvious that I noticed it right away as soon as I opened Visual Studio on ubuntu.

[searene]

@bpasero Sorry that I just saw your suggestion. I tried code --disable-gpu and found that this time font-rendering was a lot better! I think it's almost the same as electron now. Is it due to my GPU driver?

[bpasero]

Could be, I think the situation will improve once we update to a newer Electron version which we plan to do soonish.

[lbassuncao]

The same with me using Ubuntu 17.04. This problem has been persisting ever since on Linux.

[lbassuncao]

Please correct this issue.

[hristod]

I am also experiencing this problem. From what I can see, this is an electron related problem, not only in VS Code...