I have found that best font experience for me is hinting ‘none’/antialiasing LCD in gnome-tweak-tools. That makes Gnome fonts (e.g. Nautilus) look very good. Firefox is another beast. What made me happy was setting Xft resources setting also to same values as in Gnome. I also set DPI of my monitor in Xresources. I also switched Firefox display backend to Cairo Unfortuntely sites like Facebook seems to ignore Linux so I had to disable allowing sites to change font (probably it could be set in FreeType config to subsitute Facebook font also)
Personally I wish that this was all sorted upstream because the default fonts and settings are pretty ugly, especially if you are coming from the Mac world.
I too prefer Fedora… but the stock fonts and their rendering are pretty ugly… once you use the fedora-better-fonts package I think Fedora looks as good as a Mac.
Fonts are a pretty key part of the experience when you look at a screen of text all day.