I tried different font settings in the font settings and it didn't improve much (font hinting, anti aliasing, custom DPI settings, different font size)
The font is the default one which is Ubuntu Regular with font size set to 10
Sub pixel order is set properly to RGB Linux Mint xfce
Even when running windows in a virtual machine, the font rendering in it is miles ahead of what I got on my Linux setup!!!
If your next machine has a higher pixel density than 1080p, the need for aggressive hinting diminishes as pixels are smaller & needing to extrapolate subpixels accurately is less important (and less taxing to compute). That wouldn’t help you now, but in the future you may want to consider something like 2.8k which isn’t overkill like 4k on a small laptop display at arm’s length.
Thanks for the valuable information! I'm still not sure if I'm gonna get a laptop or build a desktop as an upgrade for the future but one thing is sure is that 1440p is the absolute minimum for me, no way in hell I'm getting anything lower than that