Canonical Preparing Updated Ubuntu Font For Ubuntu 23.04

[skeevy420]

THe reality is that most of my issues have nothing to do with LTS. Firefox / Discord's incredible, astonishing slowness is due to snap. While they are apparently working to fix it, the nature of snaps means that it will always feel like a nasty callback to the days of HDDs when you do a fresh boot and try to open your browser (chug, chug, chug....).

And many of the driver issues are due to design decisions by Canonical, trying to simultaneously not have nvidia drivers out of the box (in some nod to FOSS purists) while making it easy to install via a helper package. The end result is a half-baked system that is less reliable and less able to be troubleshot than simply running the nvidia binary installer-- and my recollection is that their helper package caused conflicts and was a total pain to work around. Again: not a LTS issue, but an issue with how they've architected things.

Canonical has too much history rocketing from least viable product to least viable product which tends to make even their LTS releases feel less mature than Fedora's regular releases. Where's upstart, Mir, ZFS support? What happened to the Ubuntu-on-NTFS "try before you buy" install option? When are they deprecating snap and AD GPO support?

The upshot is nothing really feels fully baked, and the out-of-box experience is pretty horrible. Fonts certainly don't fix any of that.

I stand by what I said.

The way they go from Sid to Stable is what affects the quality of everything else they do. Instead of being like Fedora or SUSE who have upstreams that roll along with the latest developments in the world so they don't get caught with their pants down, the Ubuntu way of doing that is by freezing Sid in intervals to make .10 and non-LTS .04 releases. While that's similar to Fedora stable releases, they still don't have the equivalent of Rawhide; something that rolls ahead of everything else as a buffer.

If they turned Debian Experimental+Sid into a rolling release model they'd catch a hell of a lot more edge-cases and be more prepared instead of getting hit walls of "Oh fuck, that's a lot of new" every six months when they do their freeze and rebase cycle. There's a lot of wasted manpower in that freeze and rebase cycle that'd be better used by getting things as they happen instead of doing them en-mass during their cycle; instead of just having to cross some T's and dot some I's like the Fedora release folks thanks to Rawhide and their slow, but constant, development cycle.

All that wasted manpower is why everything else feels half-assed on Ubuntu. Because it is half-assed due to decisions made in the early 00s. Biannual freeze and rebase cycles made a lot more sense before things like git, svn, multicore CPUs, and mass broadband existed. Information moved slower and you could develop around that. It's a different world now. Information moves faster. Ubuntu needs to adapt to the modern world. You can't just rebase stuff every six months or so like you could 10 and 20 years ago. Too much stuff changes in that time frame now.

Even Microsoft realized that and adapted Windows into a Fedora-like model where the different Windows channels act like Rawhide (Dev), Fedora (Beta), Cent (Release Preview), and RHEL (Release).

[acobar]

Actually the Ubuntu fonts are available directly from the official openSUSE repositories.

Now, I'm putting my hat of "stupid" on. Never tried to write "ubuntu" in yast package search. :-(

[ll1025]

Then you must be using a different version of Office 365 as it's not the default anymore over here.

Also, my point about other OS's changing fonts still stands.

I'm curious what font you're getting. I'm on the most recent Microsoft 365 release beta and its still calibri.

And I should make my point more clear. Microsoft can afford to muck around with fonts, both because it's been a lot longer for Calibri than for Ubuntu's fonts (17 vs 13 years), and because they have a lot fewer desktop warts to figure out.

Yes yes, the devs aren't the same ones doing the fonts, but that's not really the point here. Calibri is a lot less fresh because it's been used a lot more because Windows / Office is a lot more approachable, and you don't get the impression that MS is wasting time on frivolities.

I do get that impression with Ubuntu, given that they abandon projects left and right (Mir? Unity? ZFS / zsys?), have a terrible OOB experience, and now apparently are headlining a font change as if anyone cared. Why don't they fix up zfs support, fix their installer's NTFS detection so it doesn't hang, fix their OOB nvidia experience, fix the horrendous snap and snap+electron performance issues, anything so that showcasing Ubuntu to a friend isnt a complete embarassment to linux.

[Vistaus]

Calibri is still the default font in Office 2022 and Office 365. The news articles you're reading will all say the same things-- that Microsoft is looking for a new default font, but has not established one yet. By the time they do so, it will likely be ~2025, which would be a nearly 20 year run for Calibri.

Then you must be using a different version of Office 365 as it's not the default anymore over here.

Also, my point about other OS's changing fonts still stands.

[woddy]

why use an actual installation? you can just get the tar/deb directly https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/fonts-ubuntu/


is that a ren & stimpy reference? arent those issues the same since the beginning? it's always been a trash font (however i'm currently looking at the existing chars on gfonts in a windows web browser)

serif is not good for legibility nor interfaces (citations and outliers needed, monospaced terminals/code often have serifs, sometimes as a hybrid font)

lowercase heights in general end up varying wildly at small sizes due to trying to align to pixels, i myself highly enjoy pixel-perfect fonts and so for example windows at >100% scale is just disgusting where every font and border gets thinner

Actually the Ubuntu fonts are available directly from the official openSUSE repositories.

[ll1025]

When they Myth of LTS meets the Reality of LTS.

The Myth is that LTS is means Long Term Stability and that Stability means the stability of the software in regards to crashing. The Reality is that Stability mean stability of the software in regards to feature updates and changes. If you were using one of those .10 interim releases, those are even more random and chaotic in regards to package freezing.

20+ years ago it made sense to snapshot Debian Sid and to try to stabilize it. Nowadays, trying to do that while doing all sorts of Ubuntu Stuff is just stupid. Think about that. They're using what is essentially Debian Beta and calling it LTS. Unlike RHEL or SUSE, there are no upstream bug testing distributions for their LTS base. Fedora and Tumbleweed knowledge go into RHEL and Leap whereas Ubuntu takes Sid and tries to LTS it on the fly. They don't have that upstream buffer. These days, snapshotting Sid and stabilizing it is just dumb and your post really highlights how they really, really need to ditch the useless .10 releases and create either a Debian or an Ubuntu Rolling Edition in their place to act as an upstream bug catcher like the other LTS folks offer.

THe reality is that most of my issues have nothing to do with LTS. Firefox / Discord's incredible, astonishing slowness is due to snap. While they are apparently working to fix it, the nature of snaps means that it will always feel like a nasty callback to the days of HDDs when you do a fresh boot and try to open your browser (chug, chug, chug....).

And many of the driver issues are due to design decisions by Canonical, trying to simultaneously not have nvidia drivers out of the box (in some nod to FOSS purists) while making it easy to install via a helper package. The end result is a half-baked system that is less reliable and less able to be troubleshot than simply running the nvidia binary installer-- and my recollection is that their helper package caused conflicts and was a total pain to work around. Again: not a LTS issue, but an issue with how they've architected things.

Canonical has too much history rocketing from least viable product to least viable product which tends to make even their LTS releases feel less mature than Fedora's regular releases. Where's upstart, Mir, ZFS support? What happened to the Ubuntu-on-NTFS "try before you buy" install option? When are they deprecating snap and AD GPO support?

The upshot is nothing really feels fully baked, and the out-of-box experience is pretty horrible. Fonts certainly don't fix any of that.

[skeevy420]

Ubuntu has so many big fat warts that to focus on fonts seems almost insulting. I tried to get a friend up and running on Ubuntu last year after Windows kicked the bucket and we didn't have install media. I'm a *nix veteran of ~20 years and had Ubuntu as a daily driver for years, but the process was a fiasco:

So yea, changing fonts is not great when very basic things like "have 5 year old graphics card work" take ages to set up. Maybe Canonical can do another 1000 papercuts initiative like they did for 10.04-- goodness knows they need it.

When they Myth of LTS meets the Reality of LTS.

The Myth is that LTS is means Long Term Stability and that Stability means the stability of the software in regards to crashing. The Reality is that Stability mean stability of the software in regards to feature updates and changes. If you were using one of those .10 interim releases, those are even more random and chaotic in regards to package freezing.

20+ years ago it made sense to snapshot Debian Sid and to try to stabilize it. Nowadays, trying to do that while doing all sorts of Ubuntu Stuff is just stupid. Think about that. They're using what is essentially Debian Beta and calling it LTS. Unlike RHEL or SUSE, there are no upstream bug testing distributions for their LTS base. Fedora and Tumbleweed knowledge go into RHEL and Leap whereas Ubuntu takes Sid and tries to LTS it on the fly. They don't have that upstream buffer. These days, snapshotting Sid and stabilizing it is just dumb and your post really highlights how they really, really need to ditch the useless .10 releases and create either a Debian or an Ubuntu Rolling Edition in their place to act as an upstream bug catcher like the other LTS folks offer.

[ll1025]

Ways off? So you haven't heard how Calibri is replaced as the default font in MS Office? That's a big change, unless you want me to believe that MS Office is barely used anymore…

Calibri is still the default font in Office 2022 and Office 365. The news articles you're reading will all say the same things-- that Microsoft is looking for a new default font, but has not established one yet. By the time they do so, it will likely be ~2025, which would be a nearly 20 year run for Calibri.

Also, I don't understand what age has to do with it. Apple and Google (macOS, iOS and Android resp.) have changed fonts more than once in the last 25 years, yet I don't see them losing any market share over it.

Ubuntu has so many big fat warts that to focus on fonts seems almost insulting. I tried to get a friend up and running on Ubuntu last year after Windows kicked the bucket and we didn't have install media. I'm a *nix veteran of ~20 years and had Ubuntu as a daily driver for years, but the process was a fiasco:

• The partition wizard hung before letting us make choices (hours), and ps indicates it was trying to run `ntfsresize`-- unclear why, since `fdisk` should have pulled all the necessary partition info. Only by manually killing the process could we get the installer to continue
• First boot, Firefox takes ages to load on gaming hardware. That's right, its snap!
• Discord wants to install as an electron app, inside of a snap. 30 seconds to load on an i7 seems reasonable.
• Youtube stutters terribly. Must be video drivers-- no problem we'll just install them. This process takes forever, Ubuntu drivers dont work, nor do any in the repos, have to resort to manually downloaded blob driver
• Try to get wine / steam up and running, but there are dependency problems that require a mix of PPAs, CLI banging, and traditional voodoo dances
• His mouse and keyboard don't work right
• Try to get a gnome extension working (like desktop cube) but even that doesn't work because of a mix of Wayland + snap restrictions

The entire thing was embarrassing. It actually made me embarrassed that he knew that my day job involves linux administration, and this was the best linux could offer.

So yea, changing fonts is not great when very basic things like "have 5 year old graphics card work" take ages to set up. Maybe Canonical can do another 1000 papercuts initiative like they did for 10.04-- goodness knows they need it.

[Sonadow]

Not my type of font.

Where fonts are concerned, there are only four fonts that I absolutely must have; Microsoft's Calibri, Android's Roboto and Noto Sans CJK, and Russia's PT Astra Sans.

All other fonts can rot.

[acobar]

why use an actual installation? you can just get the tar/deb directly https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/fonts-ubuntu/

I get it from an actual installation because, as I said, I have a lonely computer that runs Ubuntu. Well, actually, Ubuntu+Windows 10, as I need to support both. Thankfully, all my other computers have openSUSE installed, for servers, Leap (at least while SUSE provide it), for development, Tumbleweed.

Thank you, anyway, for the URL, I may download from there to check what has changed.