Microsoft's Latest Open-Source Contribution: A New Font For Terminals & Code Editors

[ehansin]

For full disclosure, first of I was being a little harsh. Other than that, I was mostly pointing some things out about my personal feeling on Gnome, which at the basic level I mostly like. But there seems to be so many little details where I see fail after fail. And by curved top bars, I meant the menu bar up top with the small curves at each end. A small little detail, but looks amateurish. Add up all those small little details, and that is my point. But I do want to absolutely see success in the Linux desktop space.

[tildearrow]

Are you effing kidding me? A major reason why the Linux desktops sucks is because of crappy fonts

I sort of agree (but I don't think it's a "major" reason). DejaVu Sans being the biggest offender here.

(and crappy icons),

Mostly in older programs, and GNOME (sometimes Plasma too... but overall, I think you can blame the Flat Design Revolution for that).

not to mention stupid curved top bars.

Sorry? I don't think they are stupid?

[metallurge]

Are you effing kidding me? A major reason why the Linux desktops sucks is because of crappy fonts (and crappy icons), not to mention stupid curved top bars. Ascetics matter, maybe not to nerds, but to a lot of people. Take a look at OSX 10.9 vs. 10.10+ - the change between the two brought in a ton a better ascetics. And for all you Windows 10 haters, and I hate the phone home aspect of it, it is a nice looking desktop.

Aesthetics, by the way...

To each, their own, I suppose. I personally really hate the UI choices Microsoft has been making since about Win2k. OTOH, Apple started with a groundbreakingly wonderful UI, when the alternative was Windows 1.x or 2.x, or the X11 of that era (Athena widgets). But OSX is a beating for me today, possibly even more than Windows 10, and that's saying something. I stick with LXDE these days, but I am still on LUbuntu 18.04, so I have no real opinion of the new QT-LXDE version yet.

I watch my wife, who, as a professional musician, has been roped into the iTunes ecosystem, struggle with her iPhone and iPad constantly because of the braindead nonintuitive UI. Any take-over-the-screen modal UI freaking needs a dedicated "back" button and a "home" button, and I just don't know why Apple, of all companies, doesn't understand this.

So, yeah, I personally think Microsoft and Apple have missed the mark on their UIs. I don't care how pretty something is if it isn't functional. I don't really consider Windows 10 or OSX or iOS more than minimally functional, from my perspective. And, yes, I do care about aesthetics too--just not more than functionality.

[ehansin]

Your rant boils down to "someone told me 10 years ago all non-Apple Unix DEs sucked, so it must be true."

First of all, my response lacked tack, and I have been meaning to acknowledge that here. So my apologizes in regards to that. I will say, I want the Linux desktop to succeed, and I know there is good work being done. But I personally still think there is still room for much improvement. That said, I am on the side of the Linux desktop, I just think sometimes (in my eyes) some stuff looks amateurish (whiles other stuff looks great!) Believe me, I want a simple, no-fuss, doesn't phone home desktop.

Anyway, I didn't need to post in such a knee-jerk fashion.

[angrypie]

Are you effing kidding me? A major reason why the Linux desktops sucks is because of crappy fonts (and crappy icons), not to mention stupid curved top bars. Ascetics matter, maybe not to nerds, but to a lot of people. Take a look at OSX 10.9 vs. 10.10+ - the change between the two brought in a ton a better ascetics. And for all you Windows 10 haters, and I hate the phone home aspect of it, it is a nice looking desktop.

Your rant boils down to "someone told me 10 years ago all non-Apple Unix DEs sucked, so it must be true."

Windows 10 UI is great on a phone, but it absolutely sucks on a desktop. GNOME Shell is more of a desktop UI than Windows 10 will ever be (and it also seems to work just as well on a phone). And let's not even mention KDE, which is basically a modern-day CDE that can also scale up and down very well.

Other DEs borrow from those two and are also (potentially) equally capable. And none of them pry open your files to send them to three-letter agencies.

A common complaint on Linux was font rendering (thankfully most distros nowadays ship with better defaults). Font rendering on Linux is better than the blurry glyphs on OS X/macOS/whatever-name-it-has-today or the craptastic ClearType on Windows.

ClearType has never improved, if at all. It's basically the same fucking shit since Vista.

[reavertm]

I have Liberation installed (Debian) but there's no Liberation Sans Mono.

I stand corrected, I meant Liberation Mono.

[ehansin]

Oh cool, I don't think we have enough fucking fonts available already.

When will they stop fucking around and actually do something relevant to open source?

Are you effing kidding me? A major reason why the Linux desktops sucks is because of crappy fonts (and crappy icons), not to mention stupid curved top bars. Ascetics matter, maybe not to nerds, but to a lot of people. Take a look at OSX 10.9 vs. 10.10+ - the change between the two brought in a ton a better ascetics. And for all you Windows 10 haters, and I hate the phone home aspect of it, it is a nice looking desktop.

[clavko]

Anonymous Pro lover here - but I used to use Fira Code, Dejavu Mono and Consolas as well. I'll need to take a look at this MS thing to see what good are those glyphs. MS is not too bad at fonts, Tahoma and Consolas are really nice.

[chilinux]

Coming in at 241 regular glyphs, this font covers 0.2% of the Unicode v12 characters!

Hopefully your code editor never attempts to use bold or italics for highlighting sections of code because this font does not provide that.

Maybe someday someone will release much more complete font with 897 glyphs under a SIL Open Font License. But until that day comes, I guess this is a really amazing offering from the Microsoft!

[angrypie]

Oh cool, I don't think we have enough fucking fonts available already.

When will they stop fucking around and actually do something relevant to open source?