Windows Font Rendering

Whenever I see a mac or some flavor of linux the font always looks waaaaaaay nicer than Windows does. Things just look smoother, sharper and overall just generally more pleasing. Why is this? It may seem trivial but when you are reading thousands of words every single day of your working life, it's the little things that make a big difference. 

Is there any change in Win8? Are there any plans to? Do you have any thoughts? 
Thanks for your time.  

I have a mac mini... and I hate the font rendering on that thing... too fuzzy...

They say the Mac optimizes for hi-res displays... while Windows optimizes for low-res displays (with hintings & stuff)... plus, there are a lot of crappy fonts on Windows, too... you gotta avoid those

@Pacey: Frankly I hate the way most Linux distribution do font smoothing, it does not look sharp at all. Mac does a pretty good job, but Cleartype is still one of the best solution I have found.

4 hours ago, Pacey wrote

Whenever I see a mac or some flavor of linux the font always looks waaaaaaay nicer than Windows does. Things just look smoother, sharper and overall just generally more pleasing. Why is this? It may seem trivial but when you are reading thousands of words every single day of your working life, it's the little things that make a big difference. 

Is there any change in Win8? Are there any plans to? Do you have any thoughts? 
Thanks for your time.  

Windows "respects the pixel-grid" which works better on lower-resolution displays or when you're sitting closer to the screen - however Apple's type rendering system (and WPF's too, optionally) cares more about the font - so their fonts look nicer on higher-resolution displays (iPhone 4/4S) as well as when you're sat further away from the screen (text is ugly on an iPhone  2G/3G/3GS up-close, but when you move away it begins to become more legible).

But it's not just hinting and respecting the grid that's important - typefaces also are: Apple has Helvetica and Frutiger, Windows has Arial and Segoe.

I reckon when Apple introduces 2x resolution displays on their iMacs and laptops in the coming years that PC makers will follow suite and text will look great on both platforms - but for now the differences in type rendering make for platform quirks and actually I'm easy both ways - I see the advantages of both approaches and it doesn't bother me in the slightest.

It depends what you are looking at on Windows. Pre-WPF fonts look great. WPF fonts look bad, but they have been trying to improve it. As far as I can tell it is still not as good as pre-WPF fonts.