Fedora 36 Looking To Change Its Default Fonts

[birdie]

On multiple websites and forums I've seen hundreds of screenshots of various Linux distros rendering web pages and UI and I simply wanna cry each time I see this horrible blurry mess. Michael's screenshots do not fare any better - it seems like he uses whatever the defaults are.

Of course if you have a high DPI screen font rendering becomes irrelevant.

[lu_tze]

How dare you say DejaVu Sans is better than Cantarell?
It's an old and obese font.
Apple replaced Lucida with Helvetica and then San Francisco.
Microsoft replaced MS Shell with Tahoma and then Segoe.
But the Linux community? No, DejaVu Sans since 2000 and still going...

Come on, give Linux desktop a good refresh...

DejaVu fonts are not installed by default for a while. Cantarell, a deformed monstrosity, is default since 2010 or so. So if you want a fresh look, get rid of it. Anything you replace it with will be an improvement.

[MadeUpName]

I bet if they had changed them and this story hadn't run I wouldn't even have noticed the difference.

[uid313]

For me it is important that a font can display en dash (–), em dash (—) and hyphen (-) with different lengths.

[bobbie424242]

The only fonts that truly matter:

$fc-match sans
arial.ttf: "Arial" "Regular"
$fc-match mono
consola.ttf: "Consolas" "Regular"
$fc-match serif
times.ttf: "Times New Roman" "Regular"

In case you wonder, fontconfig automatically pick them up if installed (on my distro at least).

[ping-wu]

Noto CJK has problem properly displaying apostrophe (upper line):



But with a slight modification (re Sarasa UI fonts, lowerr line), this problem can disappear

[tornado99]

A lot of the fonts discussed here are old, and designed for the 80dpi display era.

Noto is very complete, but also quite plain, boring, and in my opinion a bit ugly.

If you are lucky enough for your language to be covered by either of these fonts, they are far better and more modern than any of those discussed so far:

https://github.com/IBM/plex (System UI font)

https://github.com/impallari/Cabin (Firefox default sans font, taking notes etc.)

https://github.com/microsoft/cascadia-code (terminal/coding font)

https://github.com/silnrsi/font-gent...ses/tag/v6.001 (beautiful serif font for long text documents)

also make sure that you have the following settings:

hinting: slight, subpixel antialiasing: rgb, lcdfilter: default (most 94 dpi+ monitor)

hinting: off, subpixel antialiasing: off, lcdfilter: none (4k monitor)

[TuesdayPogo]

I'm surprised that they're not just using IBM Plex, with Fedora's relationship with IBM. I've been using it for a while, and it looks good while being readable. I really thought they were going to use that when I saw the news.

[ManicRobot]

Good decision. Noto is one of the best looking fonts. But they also have to change to subpixel AA by default like in other distros, because the fonts look awful with greyscale AA if you don't have an HiDPi monitor.

For me it's the other way around, I hate subpixel font rendering with a burning passion, in my opinion those rainbow artifacts you get look way worse than what greyscale font rendering does. But fortunately GNOME Tweaks has a setting for that, so anyone can get what they like, I guess

[CommunityMember]

As I recall, KDE Plasma default changed to the noto fonts a few years ago. With this push, perhaps Gnome will follow.

It should be noted that defaults are just defaults, and as fonts are often about individual taste (and there is no accounting for taste), one can always choose the font that one prefers, even if that is cosmic sans :-).