From the article: "Yes, all of us know the text tool (in Krita) is horrible but at least it is a bit better than the last one which was just pure shit." Pinta also has a terrible text tool. It's so bad that sometimes the font selector disappears and you can't get it back. Generic problem with Linux image editors?
I'd settle for something on Linux that works as well as Photoshop Elements from ten years ago.
GIMP is just astoundingly bad in this area as well. The hinting is bad looking enough that you have to disable it, and when you enable anti-aliasing (required for decent looking fonts) it enables sub-pixel anti-aliasing too, which already doesn't make much sense since the results are so completely different on different LCD screens, but it's implemented in a retina-searingly bad fashion. I don't know why they don't just use the standard FreeType rendering, which looks fine on my system.
So to get decent looking fonts in GIMP, I have to do this:
1. Render the fonts into a layer with 3x the final resolution, hinting disabled, and anti-aliasing enabled.
2. Use the desaturation filter to get rid of the terrible colorful pixels created by the anti-aliasing.
3. Scale the layer back down 3x to the final size I wanted.
The fact that this works proves there's no inherent reason why GIMP couldn't have good font rendering, but it's been a mess for as long as I can remember.
One additional note that seemed important in case anyone reads this: I just tested GIMP's font rendering on macOS and it's completely different than on Linux. There's no "colorful" sub pixel rendering, and the results seem blurrier to me at the same font size, although the latter might be because this is on a high DPI screen with scaling.
So consider the above to only apply to the Linux version of GIMP.
I'd settle for something on Linux that works as well as Photoshop Elements from ten years ago.