Any KaOS users that uses VS Code from KCP affected by a bug that resembles the issue described here?
https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode/issues/35675

Quite a few users reported issue resolved after downgraded from FreeType 2.8.1 to FreeType 2.8.0. Unfortunately, I don't have the previous version in my cache folder anymore to verify if it indeed will resolve the issue.

Atom users also reported a similar issue and the fix.
https://github.com/atom/atom/issues/15737

Any VS Code or Atom user able to confirm the issue and/or the fix?

Previous freetype is uploaded, please check if that makes a difference:

sudo pacman -U https://sourceforge.net/projects/kaosx/files/packages/freetype2-2.8-1-x86_64.pkg.tar.xz

Thank you for making the previous version available again.

Yes, downgrading to 2.8 indeed fixed the weird font rendering issue that affected VS Code.

    Hi jantarmantar, I think it's not precisely a bug on that package and more likely to be the new way of font hinting they enabled with the new release of freetype, because it conflicts with the user fontconfig file. I had the same problem like you, until I removed the file on ~/.config/fontconfig dir 😃. So could you try if that solves your issue with the 2.8.1 version of freetype?

        9 days later

        fjmorazan Sorry for the late reply and thanks for the suggestion. I finally got around to trying your suggestion, but unfortunately it did not help me. Although the artifacts are very minor and can be easy to miss on a casual glance but they become annoying very soon.

        From the posts I linked above, it seems the root cause (https://bugs.chromium.org/p/skia/issues/detail?id=6663) was indeed in Chromium's skia component's character shaping algorithm. This was fixed in Chromium 60, but Electron is still based on Chromium 58. So until Electron is updated and VS Code/Atom start using the updated Chromium, we are stuck with this issue.

        PS: It seems besides me, you are the other KCP user who regularly updates VS Code. Just wanted to say thank you for your efforts.