Historically on Linux in order to get nicely rendered fonts one would need to resort to patches like Infinality, however this only applied to TrueType fonts.
In 2013 Adobe donated their CFF (Compact Font Format) rasterizer to the freetype project which greatly boosted quality of OpenType rendering. It was donated primarily for Adobe and Google’s epic Noto typeface.
Freetype has since made the CFF hinting engine default in version 2.4.12.
In contrast, while Infinality’s ClearType implementation has been part of freetype since mid 2012, it is not enabled by default due to patent concerns.
I have provided what I consider a good base-line configuration for freetype via fontconfig. There is minimal opinion of which can be easily removed. The configuration is fairly well documented in the fonts-conf(5) manual.
Simply place the configuration in XDG_CONFIG_HOME/fontconfig/fonts.conf
(~/.config/fontconfig/fonts.conf) and restart any software which
loaded the freetype library.
(Some systems do not require restarts as they update freetype settings
automatically such as GNOME via the gnome-settings-daemon or
xsettingsd.)
The Infinality Ultimate Bundle (not to be confused with Infinality itself) is a nice project which aims to create a curated and tuned collection of fonts for use on free OS' such as Linux. This is similar to what both Windows and OSX do for their users. Use this if you are not particularly interested in typefaces and simply want nice font rendering.
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The de-facto Bible of outline hinting: http://www.rastertragedy.com/
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Behdad’s excellent introduction to challenges facing high-DPI displays and their relationship to current systems: http://goo.gl/yf3M7
Thanks for this summary! A couple updates: