Question on fonts

[john]

I am sure this is a naive question but I am getting more confused after
each message....

I am not a visual person, and know nothing about fonts, except the
font I get with current master is thin and spidery and so hard to
read.  If I run emacs 25.3 (from my GNU/Linux distro) I get a font
that is clearer and a little heavier.  What I would like is to have
that 25.3 font on the current system.

I saw messages about .Xresources but I do not have such a file
anywhere.  There are two files /etc/X11/Xresources and
/etc/X11/xdm/Xresources which I suspect are the same but there is
nothing in them relating to which font is used.  As far as I can tell
the current emacs is built with cairo, Freetype, and HarfBuzz but I
have no idea what that means.

==John ffitch