Ubuntu Bionic Beaver Chewed Up My Fonts

It would be a good idea to install Ubuntu Bionic Beaver development branch 18.04 on my laptop, right? Fire up the terminal, enter a few magic commands, reboot, and bingo! Dropbox is still working. Fantastic! Google Chrome? Check. Settings intact? Check. Time to practice my sweet Python skills. Open Atom. Check. Artifacts littered through the fonts? Check. Crap.

I did attempt to fix the problem using the most obvious solution, installing Atom 1.25.0-beta2. Artifacts gone. Boom! Performance slower than my metabolism? You bet. Freezes and crashes? Yep. Now I optimistically (I am lying, I am not optimistic at all) wait to find out if whatever fixed the font issue can be isolated from the rest of the beta version and applied to the current version of Atom (I signed up for the Discuss board because I love going through that $%#$$%& @discobot crap every time I sign up with a community that uses that software). Interestingly, Google Chrome, GIMP, LibreOffice, Enpass, Dropbox, the Linux GUI and all the GNOME software show no signs of the artifacts, but the desktop client for Discord does.

Last second update! The Markdown Preview pane in Atom does NOT suffer from the same artifacts! Unfortunately, I am not skilled enough to track down the problem so it will most likely be a waiting game unless someone on the Atom board knows what to do.

The takeaway here is, do not upgrade to Ubuntu 18.04 if you are unable to deal with crappy font rendering in Atom, the Discord desktop app, and I assume other software packages that share whatever is broken here. Naturally Atom is where I spend most of my time so it is going to drive me out of my tiny mind. Carry on.