I recently installed Debian after a long time on my main computer. I had been using KDE Neon for quite some time now. And it looks like Ubuntu and Ubuntu-derived distributions do a good job of configuring font rendering by default. One can then use the infinality PPA to really improve and customize font rendering.

However, infinality takes a lot of effort to run on Debian and one can't just configure the Ubuntu PPAs to get it to work.

This post on reddit explain how to configure infinality on Debian Stretch. This works and is highly useful. And recommended!

So please make your desktops look better with the infinality patched fontconfig and other packages. You will never look back after that.