Font rendering/kerning issues with Fedora 33

Fwiw, I’ve had this same issue when using Mint. Not sure if that matters.

I’ve been looking up and down the internet for a fix to this shit. I’m 99% sure it has something to do with font rendering, probably trying to render fonts improperly because proprietary something or another. So far I’ve tried:

  • creating ~/.fonts.conf
  • creating one of those XML files
  • playing around w/gnome tweaks
  • installed fedora-better-fonts
  • copied over ms fonts from a Windows installation
  • changed all the font settings within Firefox itself to try to make SOMETHING change

Also, for some reason, in discord (webapp and standalone), my underscores get shown like this. I assume this is related to the overall problem. This specific issue happens on both Firefox AND Chrome. Pretty sure this is just discord’s text formatting schizo’ing out, since underscores are used for italicizing and underlining.

Any and all help is appreciated. I want to move over from Windows to linux full time, but this little nagging detail is the last thing that holds me up.

E: Gif of part of the problem. Notice how the text in the tabs almost ‘moves’ when focused. Doesn’t happen in Windows I don’t believe, feel like I’d have noticed that ages ago.

Another gif. Problem is more visible to me than the gif, not sure why that would be. Are there different font settings for Firefox tabs when focused vs unfocused, or something?