The text rendering thing is well known. Default settings for MacOS do not use hinting or coloured subpixel rendering (just greyscale). The higher the resolution of a display, the less you need hinting or anti-aliasing which is part of why all the current displays from Apple are high PPI.
Windows uses greyscale anti-aliasing by default nowadays, but still uses hinting to try and make it fit the pixel grid better.
You can easily play around with all these settings; AA, hinting, coloured subpixel vs greyscale in Linux.
My display is not high DPI, so on Linux I run with hinting off, cleartype coloured subpixel on, AA off and I have also carefully selected fonts that work well with these settings. I get a rendering result virtually identical to that of Windows with my chosen settings.