With respect to the anti-aliasing on Linux, I run Xfce, which easily allows one to control the font anti-aliasing in the Appearance settings under the Fonts tab. I assume that GNOME and KDE have similar configuration settings. You can also get the same sort of controls in fonts.conf [0] for applications that don't respect Xfce's settings, like Firefox, as I recall. I could make everything as sharp as I'd like with the right settings.

In my experience, basically every window manager has some 90s-esque style as well.

[0] There's more information buried in here: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Font_configuration