17.10 font hinting broken?

[Luca Olivetti]

I just upgraded to 17.10[*] and, as every time I upgrade, the fonts 
sucks: I like my fonts crisp, so I hate antialiasing at the normal font 
sizes.
OTOH without aliasing most fonts have bad hinting and look awful, so I 
use fonts with good hinting (msttcorefonts), aliasing disabled between 8 
and 15 points and full hinting.
This usually fixes the problem with bad fonts, but this time it doesn't: 
it seems that it doesn't do hinting at all and the fonts are badly 
rendered (just like they usually do with the autohinter).

I tried both using the kde fonts settings (which writes 
~/.config/fontconfig/fonts.conf [**]) and linking (in /etc/fonts)
conf.avail/10-hinting-full.conf to conf.d but I couldn't fix the problem.

At the moment I had to enable aliasing for all font sizes and my eyes 
are bleeding (though they bled even more without the correct hinting).

Any hint (no pun intended)?

[*]side note: it didn't propose the upgrade even if I have enabled in 
discover the setting to show all upgrades, I had to upgrade manually 
with do-release-upgrade

[**]side note 2: it seems that kde cannot parse back the fonts.conf it 
writes, since, e.g., it shows the aliasing as "disabled" when I just 
enabled it and it wrote fonts.conf.


Bye
-- 
Luca