hi, did some more testing on LINUX and it really seems that UBUNTU is the problem here.
i did a fresh install of UBUNTU 19.04 and DEBIAN 10 on my machine. both with XFCE as desktop and nothing else but PD 0.49.3 installed via "apt-get install"
the font rendering difference is huge (see attachment or here)
https://wolke.klingt.org/index.php/s/VRoJ3e6xTpsoKOD
as you can see, in both situations, the same settings are used and the same fonts are loaded at startup. yet in UBUNTU the spacing between characters is much larger (also in PD's console window) than in DEBIAN.
mmmh ...
best
oliver