Hi folks,
I was wondering what people’s thoughts are on the state of font rendering on Linux and if there are any important settings/packages I might not be aware of.
I’ve never been particularly font sensitive. So despite being a long time user at this point… I’m still a Linux fonts noob. However, I know a lot of people are big into fonts.
I recently installed Debian KDE as a desktop for my father. He likes it, but he wasn’t crazy about the fonts. We turned the normal subpixel rendering on in KDE Font settings, but some pages definitely had blocky looking fonts (e.g. the Yahoo home page my dad still uses 🙃).
Any tips? The documentation in this area seems to be lacking… and maybe it’s just the resolution of the mintors and things (my dad had gotten used to his high resolution phone so jumping back to a 28" 1080p monitor is going to look blocky no matter what). Regardless, if there are any tips or things I might have missed, they’d be much appreciated!
You can use this
font.confto improve your font rendering: https://gist.github.com/AhmedMostafa16/e2ee6661899f405781dbce54ae231158Save it to
~/.config/fontconfig/fonts.conf. Then install all the font packages mentioned in the comments. Finally, runfc-cacheand/or reboot your system to apply the changes.Note that this isn’t a magical fix, you may still need to tweak the hinting/aliasing/subpixel rendering etc based on your monitor, resolution, DPI, and personal preference. Check out this page for more details on how to tweak this + some troubleshooting tips: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/font_configuration
Wow, that’s a lot of tweaks!