Strange font smoothing/blurring on VSCode verions 1.107 and later, doesn't seem to be software-specific

I noticed that updating to any VSCode version newer than 1.106 made my editor fonts look strange, they come out blurrier than before and sharper edges have been smoothed out. I made a post on the vscode subreddit about this, and who I talked with said there doesn't seem to be any recent change to vscode to cause it, and that I should ask around about Zorin OS specifically, so that's where I am. I can't seem to find any settings in the Settings app, Zorin Appearance, or Tweaks, that seem related to this or have fixed it - Tweaks has a setting for subpixel rendering, but changing it doesn't fix anything. I don't really know how much this could be a ZorinOS problem specifically given that this issue only occurs after certain versions of the software (I manually installed vscode version 1.106.3 and it looks just fine), but maybe someone has encountered the same issue.

The post linked above has two before & after images showing the difference, you might need to view them at full resolution to see it - the square brackets are a pretty clear example.

I'm running ZorinOS 17.3 Core on a laptop (64-bit, Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 3 15ABR8) at 1920x1080 using X11, if any more information would help just let me know what to get.

VS Code is built in Electron.
So while Zorin OS or the VSCode dev may have not made direct changes to affect this, the Electron base likely has.
Electron has focused on Wayland compatibility. Older than 1.106 is probably leaning more toward X11 and XWayland and newer than that more toward Wayland.

So Electron may have changed text rasturization behavior in newer releases.

1 Like

Did You switched to Wayland to see if it behaves the same? What Graphics Card do You have? Is Fractional Scaling acitve?

Sorry for the late response. I tried switching to Wayland, but no change - everything still looks as it did before on 1.106 compared to testing with 1.109.

Fractional scaling was not turned on before, but after turning it on I also saw no difference. The scale is at 100% as well - if it means anything, I'm using an external monitor as my primary display, both it and the laptop's built-in display are both set to 1920x1080.

As for my graphics card, the "About" section of the settings app shows this for the "graphics" section: RENOIR (renoir, LLVM 15.0.7, DRM 3.57, 6.8.0-94-generic)

Running sudo lshw -c display for more information results in:

  *-display
       description: VGA compatible controller
       product: Barcelo
       vendor: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI]
       physical id: 0
       bus info: pci@0000:04:00.0
       logical name: /dev/fb0
       version: c5
       width: 64 bits
       clock: 33MHz
       capabilities: pm pciexpress msi msix vga_controller bus_master cap_list fb
       configuration: depth=32 driver=amdgpu latency=0 mode=1920x1080 resolution=3840,2160 visual=truecolor xres=1920 yres=1080
       resources: iomemory:40-3f iomemory:40-3f irq:54 memory:460000000-46fffffff memory:470000000-4701fffff ioport:1000(size=256) memory:fd300000-fd37ffff

If at all relevant, my CPU is an AMD Ryzen 5 7530U.

Did You tried Zorin 18? It has a newer Kernel.