Google Noto vs Hack
When comparing Google Noto vs Hack, the Slant community recommends Hack for most people. In the question“What are the best programming fonts?” Hack is ranked 7th while Google Noto is ranked 92nd.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Optimized for a large variety of displays
Glyph design on Noto Sans is well designed and accounts for HiDPI and standard displays.
Pro Open-source
Licensed and distributed under the SIL Open Font License.
Pro Retina-ready
Looks very clean and crisp on retina displays.
Pro Simple and yet beautiful
Simple and beautiful - much like the Windows counterparts such as Calibri and Arial but it's native for Linux and for this reason it looks better than these two with anti-aliasing.
Pro Expansive character set
Noto Sans is one of the most comprehensive fonts in the market, covering an estimated 30+ languages backed by Google.
Pro Very readable
Pro Libre webfonts are available in svg, eot, ttf, woff, and woff2 formats
Hack is free for unlimited commercial and non-commercial use. The webfonts are hinted (TrueType instruction set) to optimize display on the screen and are built into all commonly used web font formats with each new release. They include the complete release character set and smaller (filesize) basic Latin subset releases. They are available in the build directory of the repository.
Pro Fixes many readability issues in Vera/DejaVu
The tilde symbol ('~'), comma (',') and semicolon (';') glyphs have been modified to be more readable at small sizes and/or on non-HD displays. In addition, the underscore symbol ('_') has been slightly lifted for alignment with surrounding characters.
Pro Avaliable in many GNU/Linux distro package manager
Including Debian/Ubuntu (fonts-hack), Fedora (font-hack-ttf), OpenSUSE (hack-fonts), Arch (ttf-hack) and probably many more. Much nicer than having to manually install/update
Pro Free/Open license
Pro Renders accurately on Windows on all font sizes
Pro Based on the tried and tested Bitstream Vera Sans Mono
The fonts are in the Vera Sans Mono lineage with a significant expansion of the character set (which includes Cyrillic and modern Greek character sets), new glyph shapes and modifications of the original glyph shapes, as well as improvements in metrics and hinting/TT instructions to make it more legible at small text sizes used for source code.
The changelog is available here.
Pro Powerline glyph patch is included
The regular set is patched with Powerline glyphs by default. There is no need to patch the font to use it in Powerline environments.
Pro Source code is released in UFO format
UFO source format is widely supported by all modern font editors if you would like to modify the typeface.
Cons
Con Font pack might be too large
Because it is so comprehensive, the TTF/OTF packages in ZIP is really large.
Con No ligatures in the default font
Although patched versions with ligatures do exist - see here.
Con Sometimes difficult to distinguish lowercase "i" (eye) and lowercase "l" (ell)
When using a higher resolution monitor and a smaller font size, the lowercase "i" (eye) and lowercase "l" (ell) are very difficult to distinguish. The space between the dot and the remainder of the letter seems to somehow disappear, thereby making it look like a solid line, similar to the lowercase "l" (ell).
Con Too similar to DejaVu
See this gif comparison between the two fonts.