As I recently discovered there is a reason why fonts look so bad on Linux. Apart from general lack of good Truetype fonts, some of the algorithms of used in the font rendering are patented by Apple. So on Linux you can't render fonts quite correctly even if they are good. I had such a feeling that something is wrong when I installed my Windows fonts on Linux. They still looked worse than on Windows platform (though better than default Linux fonts).
But fear not my friends, as the font rendering engine in Linux, Freetype, has those patented algorithms in there, only disabled in most distributions. Since it's all about Open Source on Linux, you can enable them by recompiling a certain source code. Search the web for specific instructions for your distribution. On Fedora Core it's seems to be quite easy.
