Big Sur Font Change?

[Mcrumors David]

Can anyone tell me how to change the font back to how Catalina was in BigSur?

For Asian languages it is not a good reading experience at all, everything looks worse, harder to read (example below)

 

[Mac2727]

This thread has a solution.
Would be fascinating to know why they thought the new bold was better

Any way to disable font smoothing in Big Sur?

This works for me: defaults -currentHost write -g AppleFontSmoothing -int 0 You have to log out (perhaps even reboot) to see the changes across the entire desktop. I used to disable font smoothing in System Preferences → General prior to Big Sur, which is not possible anymore. Disabling it...

forums.macrumors.com

 

[Starfia]

I've noticed the font weight seems heavier in a number of applications (though not all). I'm dying to know whether it's something controllable.

Oh, hooray! That solution worked for me too, Mac2727. Wild.

 

[Mac2727]

Previous versions had an option to turn off LCD font smoothing which some people argued made no difference if you have a high DPI display, but for me (2019 MBP15 & LG 4K Ultrafine) it’s night and day. With font smoothing turned on text is noticeably thicker and ‘blurrier’.

No idea therefore why this is the default as it is giving a poor user experience to new users who know no better and don’t know this is a thing