Linux Desktop Distros with Quality Fonts? 178
occamboy writes "I'm trying to make a case for switching to Linux desktops, and would like to demonstrate how advantageous Linux is. While the advantages of Linux are more obvious for us techies, I'm finding that many non-technical types are immediately negatively biased by the look of Linux desktops. The problem boils down to screen fonts. It seems that, in the distributions that I've demonstrated, the screen fonts are either all aliased, or are aliased in some places and antialiased in others, which I've been told resembles a ransom note with letters cut from different magazines. I can understand where these critics are coming from; after all, they are staring at fonts on a monitor all day long. Are there any distributions that I can demonstrate which provide smooth and consistent screen fonts without requiring a lot of messing around?"
SuSE 9.1 (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:OT- Simple guide to Linux? (Score:3, Interesting)
Mandrake 10.0 (Score:5, Interesting)
I was using my laptop (running Mandrake Linux) at a private function last week, and a 10yob I know came up, looked oddly at the screen for a few minutes, then asked "Which Windows are you using?" It took about 15 minutes and much repetition to mostly-convince him that it wasn't running MS-Windows at all, but rather KDE on Linux. This is the level of ignorance we face. This kid knows his own machine inside out, as well as a non-programmer possibly could, but had no clue that anything other than MS-Windows ever existed.
Both Mandrake and SuSE do the font thing well, including different aliasing at different sizes.
I haven't seriously tried other distros for a while but seem to remember some of the Debian-based distros (Gentoo, Knoppix) being happy out of the box nowadays, and probably Lin{spire,dows,insertsuffixhere} but that has other issues you don't want to have to deal with.
If you use the download edition of Mandrake, set it up with the Contribs as a URPMI source, and manually pull down a few things (Flash player, Win32 CoDecs and the like) from the Penguin Liberation Front sites [zarb.org]. Using PLF wide throttle is a bit risky, but cherry-picking only extras instead of replacing standard packages as well seems to work well. I've also tacked together a few extras of my own here [cyberknights.com.au], but that's a skinny DSL line; please don't melt it down.
Really? (Score:2, Interesting)
I would be really interested in seeing a screenshot or detailed description of what you notice as being craptacular about the fonts.
Re:I don't think so. (Score:3, Interesting)
If Longhorn's display technology ever makes it, it'll fix all this. Or if Apple beats them to the punch. It'll be nice to run a monitor at 1600x1200 and not have to press my nose against the glass to read text... I have poor eyesight, too.
Another solution would be to come up with a technology that makes software *think* it's running on an 800x600 screen, but actually be running at 1600x1200... all the scaling up could be done by code that intercepts the drawing commands given to the OS, which would keep fonts and GUI elements smooth. Someone develop this.
Even in the stores! (Score:3, Interesting)
It frightens me when I go places like Best Buy and the machines are set to weird resolutions. Shouldn't you know how to make a product look good if you're trying to sell it to people?
Definitely need effort to get *the* fonts (Score:2, Interesting)
The biggest turnoff with linux for me till a few years ago, was the non-availability of good looking fonts, which made IE look like a god-send. But with the bitstream-vera and msttcorefonts, anything in X looks just cool. Actually the bitstream-vera fonts themselves'd be sufficient. Setting a single font for different styles might sound awful, but once you get used to the anti-aliasing, everything else'd look like garbage, including the venerable good looking fonts in Windows.
Opera + xterm with anti-aliasing should be sufficient for ppl like me who don't use many other apps, that use mouse a lot.
Damn, just a console with bootsplash [bootsplash.org] installed would be more than enough, to trick people that fonts in linux aren't bad
Re:95 distros - only one good font (Score:3, Interesting)
Verdana and Tahoma are the ones I see most used (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:all-antialiased just as bad/worse (Score:2, Interesting)
Unfortunately for the most part you are right. People who antialias everything should be shot.
One of the first things I do on any fresh install is alter the fonts.conf to only antialias below 8 and above 14pt, and to always antialias italic or bold text. Everything else is not. Then I grab the standard MS fontpack and use those fonts, although bitstream is slowling coming over. A lot of work was put into the MS fontpack (I think it was monotype who did it actually) to make the hinting right.
OH yes, and then I spend an hour screwing around with the latest freetype to turn ON the bytecode interpreter and disable autohinting because, no matter what they say, I think that the autohinter's output looks like pure ass.
Re:here (Score:2, Interesting)
Times, Palatino, Garamond, and other Roman-style seriffed fonts all have nice italics, but the non-free varieties of these fonts look far better than the free ones. Thryomanes has some good typographic ideas and elegant forms, but is very, very rough around the edges (serifs which don't quite line up with the stems, the italics being totally out of proportion, etc.) and needs a lot of work before it can be a worthwhile replacement for other seriffed fonts.
Sans-serif fonts also look better with an italic (rather than oblique) form, but the only one of these in common circulation is (non-free) Trebuchet. With mono fonts, however, an oblique is definitely preferable to an italic.
Java fonts (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Really? (Score:2, Interesting)
I updated my system yesterday and the fonts are so crisp it's not even funny. Most distros use freetype, and a couple of them turn on the hinting illegally, but Desktop/LX apparently has licensed font hinting and antialiasing that even surpasses Windows and Mac.
Just one screenshot here [lycoris.com].