Problem is not about an application installing or running, it's about the dialog windows that both Wine itself and applications display. For example, I can run from q4wine the notepad app in a new wine 32bit prefix and its fonts look fine. But if I select from the menubar File > Open, the fonts on the Open dialog window are not aliased. The dialog itself is fully functional, its only the fonts that are unaliased. WineCfg it turns out is a dialog (modal?) window and it opens with unaliased fonts. No change to any of the fonts listed on the WineCfg Desktop Integration Appearance Theme modify this font behavior.
I have:
1. Completely uninstalled wine (using mc to track down every folder and file to delete them); reinstalled from the MXLinux repos - no change
2. Completely uninstalled again and reinstalled using flatpak version from org.winehq.Wine - no change
3. Completely uninstalled again, added the Debian Bookwork PPAs to install from WineHq - no change
4. Googled ad nauseam various combinations of words trying to limit search results to this specific issue, but it's a bit hopeless; most everyone is looking for ways to install fonts or make fonts larger that all works fine for me; in fact, on the Winecfg tab for Appearance, the slider is at 144 dpi and the font displayed below the slider is, of course, correctly antialiased; just not any of the rest of the Winecfg dialog window or any other dialog window
5. I have made sure that any tahoma, etc. font in my Linux system that might cause some kind of font conflict was deleted and reinstalled using winetricks and rebooted my system - no change
6. I have removed nearly every font from my user /.fonts/ folder and restarted - no change
7. I have used winetricks to set the fontsmooting registry keys - no change
8. I have used winetricks to install most of the avialable fonts - no change
9. I have added specific values to my local .fonts.conf file to force Linux system aliasing and hinting hoping, based on a blog post, that might spill over into wine, and restarted - no change
Again - this is not about funcationality - it all works, it's only about the font display of dialog windows; primary windows of apps and Wine system apps (regedit, notepad, control, taskmgr) all load and display fonts as expected until I use File | Open, File | Print, etc.
Why is this a problem? On an HDPI monitor, pencil thin unaliased fonts require that I lean forward until my face is a foot from the monitor to read them. It is a real usability issue. Hoping someone here has some ideas.
Here is an image of what I'm talking about - the application mp3tag (which I've been using for several years in wine) with the File | Options dialog enabled. If you increase view to 200%, you can clearly see that the font of the dialog is not aliased while the menu font and other fonts in the app UI are:
