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Linux Desktop Distros with Quality Fonts?
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?"
try bitstream vera sans and use kde control center to set antialias settings. gnome has a tool too for font stuff. oh and btw stop demoing cli ok?
I recently installed SuSE Professional 9.1 and the fonts look really good. I use Firefox on both Windows and Linux and I even forgot which OS I was using the other day when only the browser was open.
Isn't it pretty much all the same regardless of distribution? It's all the same X. It's all the same KDE and Gnome. Do distribution maintainers really do this much stuff?
I'm not trying to troll but of all the users that I've encounterd none of them would give a second thought to crappy fonts. You don't know how many times I've sat in front of a user's nice LCD monitor set to a non-optimal resolution with antialiasing OFF!
That's a question I would also like to get an answer to, but I've kept from asking it around here because I fear a distro flame-war.
Not a Twitter sockpuppet... but I wish I was.
Why not just try a live CD for a few days? Slax, Knoppix, PCLinuxOS, MandrakeMove, etc. will all give you an idea of what it will be like.
I've had people walk up to Mandrake machines, use them for a day, and walk away not realising that it wasn't MS-Windows. If I switched those boxes to XPDE instead of KDE and did a little tweaking, I'm sure it would be easy to fool ten times as many people - if that was my aim.
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. 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, but that's a skinny DSL line; please don't melt it down.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
> I am of the opinion that linux is ugly, ...
Try 2.6.9-pre1. It is much prettier.
Incidentally, I didn't know there was a CD-bootable version of Mandrake, thanks for pointing that out.
Ask yourself two questions:
If you're happy with your current software then don't bother. If you're unhappy with your current software then tell us what you dislike and we can tell you if Linux is better or worse.
Also bear in mind that Linux was weak areas (eg, games, off-the-shelf software). If any of those weak areas are relevant to you then don't bother.
If you're simply curious then try one of the many Live CDs (eg, Suse, Knoppix). Minimal fuss and you get a roughly accurate Linux experience.
This has been the absolute opposite of my experiance. I've found the fonts on WinXP are either antialiased with colored edges or aliased, and that linux tends to get everything right with the exception of capital letter "o"
I would be really interested in seeing a screenshot or detailed description of what you notice as being craptacular about the fonts.
:wq
from my personal experience (and my personal tastes), i'm of the opinion that Mandrake is a good starting distro (i think it's a good choice). installation is easy and everything is generally set up pretty well automatically.
but if you want to learn more about the way linux works, i think Gentoo is a better option, since you basically have to set up and configure all the system services and software yourself, mostly manually. (but i love not having to touch the rc scripts.)
the reason i suggest Gentoo is because of the simple fact that the Gentoo Handbook goes into all the detail you need, holding your hand each step of the way in setting it up, and bringing it to a workable level.
what brought me to Gentoo was that i heard about the fact that you can custom-compile all the software you use. that's even what everyone assosciates with Gentoo. but what people seem to forget (or humorously omit - or maybe just not even know) is that so much of Gentoo's setup is automated. you type "emerge" and the name of your program, and it configures and compiles the program for you. you don't even have to think about it.
and with such wide choices in software, including ebuilds for some commercial games, it's really not that difficult to get started using.
and with the "compile it yourself" mantra that pervades the community, people forget that there are quite often precompiled binaries available for most software and a generic kernel configurator that makes it quick and easy to get started.
if you're interested with playing with linux now, but don't want to format any hard drives, don't forget there are several live CD distros, suck as Knoppix that will let you "test the waters," so-to-speak.
give it a whirl. you won't be sorry.
grey wolf
LET FORTRAN DIE!
freudian slip, i'm afraid. i didn't mean it. really. :P
grey wolf
LET FORTRAN DIE!
Get yourself a hard drive rack (it's a rack you can mount in a 5 1/4" bay with a case for the drive, then you can easily take the drive out of the system and swap with another), and an old hard drive (or order a new, small one from someone on pricewatch.com -- you'd be surprised how cheap you can get a drive). You can then start the computer with a Windows hard drive, or a Linux hard drive. For Linux, you can fit a good working system in under 2G -- less, depending on how many extras you install.
.NOT and Windows -- if you've got a Borders nearby, the one near us has literally 4 times the selection than B&N on ANY computer topic), and spend some time browsing through all the books that explain setting up Linux for a beginner.
That way you don't have to worry about a dual boot, you don't have to touch the original hard drive, and you can download and burn a distro. It also means you can keep all your data safe (?) on your Windows drive (I'm assuming you've got enough firewalling and AV software to actually make a Windows partition safe), so when you put Linux on a disk, you don't have to worry about making sure your Internet connection is safe.
Mandrake is probably the easiest to get started (I have a system like described above, with 4-8 drives I use for testing software and it was easier to install Mandrake 10.0 than Windows XP!). Now that you have a blank drive, get going and try it.
Installing and running Linux involves a LOT of different things. There are some guide on the Internet (try Googling with something like +linux +tutorial +beginner or variations on those terms, like guide for tutorial and you should find MANY websites), but your best bet is to hoof it to your local bookstore with a LARGE selection of computer books (Barnes and Noble carries the top 40 and is heavily slanted to Windows, with a generally poor selection on things that aren't strongly associated with
But, no matter what you do, you won't know anything until you try an install. I strongly suggest a drive rack (about $15.00), since you can abuse a Linux system all you want, and just shut down, swap drives, and your Win box is ready and unchanged. This is one of the many cases where you can only really learn by doing.
On another note, I am a former teacher and really like to help people learn, and love to see people ask questions and explore on their own. Linux has come a long way in ease-of-use (especially in installation) in the 4 years I've been using it, but it is still "off the beaten path." (It still reminds me of the early days, on my Apple ][e, where the programmers and users were all learning, one program at a time, how to work with micro computers.) It is still for the bold and those willing to not just ask questions, but who are willing to LOOK for the answers. It's great your asking here, but if you aren't able to take the extra step and use Google and figure out a few terms to find the many HOWTOs and other guides online, you might not want to try Linux (except maybe Linspire or Xandros). It is still not the place where you'll find the easy answers for everything unless you're willing to work.
Oh, and learn how to use Usenet. There are many newsgroups on there where you can get a LOT of help.
Probably preaching to the choir on this one, but if you only use crappy fonts, you will not ever get good results.
:-).
There are plenty of good, free TTFs kicking around, starting with the Microsoft ones (yes Rheba, before they realised that competitors could use them too, the Evil Empire released some of the good things they make, for free. It's difficult to make insecure fonts, but I'm sure they tried
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
There are lots of places to order live CDs online. I've seen some free promotional ones, but I'm sure you'd only pay a few bucks at most. A little article or tutorial would be nice for you, but jumping right into it with a LCD would tell you *so* much more. Particularly because no article will tell you how well Linux will work with your hardware setup out of the box (nor will one LiveCD, but better than nothing), compatability lists aside. I can't imagine anything that would confound a Mac or Windows user booting into Linux for the first time, no need to worry about that.
1) see my other post, so you won't think I'm just trolling.
2) You can buy or order many different distros. Last time I got a distro, I got Libranet for $30 in mail order. You can order or buy a number of distros for under $50.
3) Go to a local LUG (Linux Users Group). To find one, try a Google search. Ask if someone can burn a distro for you.
4) but I'd still like to know what I was getting into before even going that far. -- If you're really that squeamish, then you might not want to get into it at all. The best way is to just dive in. (Sorry, not trolling, but Linux is still about learning and exploring, not about popping a CD and playing games or browsing -- while you can do that with a live CD, if you want to learn, it isn't a walk in the park.)
Good looking fonts is one of the goals of Munjoy Linux.
Set your fonts in X. Use freetype. You have to set fonts in many many places. GTK theme. Qt theme. Xdefaults. Application specific font settings. You have to go through all these places to set the font. Some distros like Fedora Core 2 and the newer Mandrakes I know use a similar font consistently by default in all these places. But if you want consistent fonting your only real option is to go through all these places and change the fonts. It's just a fact of life. If you want the power to have different fonts in different places you have to go to all these places to change the font if you want it to be the same in all places.
I reccoment Bitstream Vera Sans. It is very nice and simple.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
Its funny, but there's really only one quality AA font for Linux right now: Bitstream Vera. Sure you can buy others, or loot them from your windows partition, but regardless of your disto the only good free one is Bitstream Vera.
Don't leave home without it.
...it's a GUI toolkit one. Stick to programs from the same UI toolkit--QT4, GTK2, whatever, as long as it's consistent. All programs written with these toolkits will have AA fonts, and use fonts consistently across the entire platform. Also, users will be ever grateful (although they might not know it), since they'll only have to get used to one style of application. It shouldn't be hard to stick to only one toolkit, with a few very minor exceptions.
No comment.
For now, I think I'll probably track down a Mandrake LiveCD and give that a shot.
Also, thanks for the reply.
Dunno. I got a fairly experienced Mac user slightly confused when I showed him an iMac running Debian last week....
Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos
*What sort of firewalls/antivirus programs are available for Linux? Are these integrated into the OS, or even necessary?
And, well, that's all I can I recall at the moment, but's it's almost 1am, so go figure.
Fiddling with software is usually pretty low on my priority list, but I'd like to at least get a feel for what everyone is talking about
Then I'd stick with a live CD for now, which will let you poke around and decide later if you want to do more. You may not get much of an idea, though, by just booting a CD and trying a few programs. After a while you'll decide they all have a different look'n'feel, but that a lot of it, without digging deeper, is just a different way of doing the same thing.
I can give you one simple example of one of the MANY things I like about Linux that isn't part of Windows. I use KDE, and it includes a panel (like the task bar). GNOME and other desktop environments use the same thing. There are many applets I can install on the panel (such as a pager, so I can have 4 or more virtual desktops, so I can keep one clean or with only a few windows on it). It's not the same as having an icon in the system tray. It's much more customizable. It might even be a flaw, but since Linux is open, MANY extra options often get added to even the smalles thing because a programmer wants to add something and simply can, instead of having to wait for the company that wrote it to add it.
The default fonts look nice, though.
This post written under Gentoo-linux with an SCO IP license.
For the most part, you don't need a firewall or an antivirus program for a Linux desktop computer. When you install a Linux distribution you should be aware of what (if any) network services are installed. Don't install things like web servers and FTP servers because you won't use them. A lot of Windows' security problems are due to unneccesary things which run by default. You need a firewall because Windows exposes a lot of its functionality to the network. Worse still, some of it (like RPC) is required for normal operation of the computer. With Linux you generally shouldn't have this problem. There won't be any stuff running unless you asked for it.
One thing that you should look out for is remote vulnerabilities in the Linux kernel. These do happen, and you should find about how to update your kernel just in case it does. If you read Slashdot then you'll at least hear about any vulnerability, and you can also ask for help.
In Soviet America the banks rob you!
How about this ?
In Soviet America the banks rob you!
You don't know how many times I've sat in front of a user's nice LCD monitor set to a non-optimal resolution with antialiasing OFF!
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?
Donate background CPU time to fight cancer.
I am not qualified to suggest any distro, as I am still glued to my windowmaker on RH8, while booting up knoppix now and then in vmware, but I can tell you that if you can take the pain of explaining people, the real eye-candy one can have with some effort, I am sure anyone would get convinced.
:p
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 installed would be more than enough, to trick people that fonts in linux aren't bad
Grab Mandrake 10, upgrade to the PLF version of freetype2 (extra patented goodness turned on), install the MSFonts and run KDE.
Done.
Oh, and use a CRT for demo's: LCD + NVidia + XFree can take a bit of tweaking to get right.
John.
Doesn't "freudian slip" mean that you *did* mean it?
If you use a Gnome 2 based distro, almost everything will be nicely antialiased.
The distro should also provide OpenOfficeOrg and Mozilla that are compiled with xft.
I use Fedora Core 2, every program has nice fonts.
On a side note, try out Dustismo for a nice text font and Penguin Attack for a nice decorative font. I don't know why distros don't include them. GPL
Some distributions integrate a firewall. For example, Fedora Core (new name for Red Hat) has an integrated firewall with GUI manager. All of the good distributions should do the same.
I'm not aware of any Linux distribution that integrates an antivirus program. There are free antivirus programs but they're aimed at people building mail servers and the like. Nothing for home users as far as I know. There aren't too many viruses for Linux though.
TrueType font hinting is patented by Apple. To legally use TrueType hinting, you must pay royalties to Apple. This is why fonts look crappy in the free distros. (And no, antialiasing is not a substitute for proper hinting.)
However, I don't know which (if any) pay-ware Linux distros have TrueType font hinting enabled.
By default(no bytecode) freetype does a very bad job at rendering truetype fonts IMHO.
anonymous
I consider the fact that Courier fonts were not used to be pretty good evidence that the documents are not fake. Unless of course, the forgers are from Australia
You even commented on some of the problems.
In Luxi Sans, the w, c, and d all have some unevenness; the e's crossbar is too high.
Trebuchet has dropouts in its e's, and its w is uneven.
Times isn't antialiased at all. Verdana is too thin for its size (and the V is about to fall apart).
The g in Impact is blocky and has some strange lumps.
Georgia almost looks aliased.
Here's a screenshot comparison between your original and the same fonts rendered by MacOS X. (I have most, but not all of the fonts). IMHO, the righthand (MacOS) side looks superior - more like actual typeset text. So what's up? Does freetype suck that badly? Are you using the non-hinted version of freetype? Is this a screen gamma difference? I used Linux/X11/freetype2 daily for a couple of years, and I never got the fonts to look the way I wanted them to. It's almost like the contrast setting is wrong, not to mention the subpixel precision of the glyph control points is out of whack (what's with the V in Verdana, anyway?).
Of course, the flipside is to say that the freetype-rendered text looks crisper, less blurry - especially Impact. I appreciate that distinction - but for me, the consistency of shape and the evenness of the glyph weighting is more important than the apparent focus.
Thanks for the great tip. The Latin-1 glyphs repertoire is obsolete--even popular English-language print publications such as Time and Newsweek have NEVER limited themselves to such a pitiful set of characters.
The full text of a 1980s Time Magazine article ought to be completely and correctly displayable anywhere text is displayed on a 21st Century computer, including the command line. For this, we need fonts such as this Gentium as standard. (Of course, we need UTF-8-based shells as standard, too, among other things, and it's starting to happen....)
"Those who have never entered upon scientific pursuits know not a tithe of the poetry by which they are surrounded."
The _only_ way to get cyrillic letters right is to use MS TrueType fonts. There are very few free fonts but they are either low quality or incomplete (no serbian glyphs in particular). I have fonts.tgz which I untar on every Linux/*BSD computer that I use.
No, I consider it crap font rendering. I've only really use three fonts : Arial, Bitstream Vera Sans, and Courier. You'll notice they look ok :) Anyway I checked and subpixel hinting was off. I turned it on, and Trebuchet and Verdana have improved a bit, but Luxi Sans still has that problem (only at 14pt though, odd).
Anyway, I'm envious of how Georgia looks on OSX (though not for long, I'm getting an iBook), but I don't like the blurriness of Andale Mono. Personally I would like to see screens running at much higher dpi. I tried running my desktop at 1920x1440 once, but there was too much hassle with programs not scaling up. Maybe with all the LCD screens going to 1600x1200 we will see the situation improve.
In Soviet America the banks rob you!
Interesting enough, this seems to be solved much better in X than in Windows. All my KDE apps etc. have just normally sized fonts out of the box; whereas in Windows I have to manually adjust many font sizes, and many apps cannot be adjusted at all.
The only problem in X are programs that assume to know how many pixels their text messages use up, with the result of having text boxes etc. in which the text just doesn't fit in at all...
Even if you find good fonts, it still lays them out in massive menus because they haven't been explicitly designed with decent ones in mind.
Gentoo's installation process is not bad if you have six hours (three to install, three to fix if you have a hardware issue). For those who are looking for a distro that at least gets the fonts right try Mepis.
-- $G
If you have a look at MS' history, they wrote precious little of their own stuff. People keep lists, but even lots of stuff not on the lists 'coz it's no longer current (e.g. MultiPlan) was not written by them, so I'd be totally unsurprised if they'd got someone else to craft those as well.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
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.
I like Mark Simonson's Anonymous font, which is a very nice, fixed width truetype font. You can get it here.
This is what I don't understand about Gentoo, (I'm a Debian user unlikely to change any time soon).
If most of the setup is automated, to the extent that compiling and installing a package is just 'emerge foo' - how do you learn so much more about the system?
Is it the installation that allows you to learn that? My understanding was that this was also scripted? And not so manual.
Linux-From-Scratch seems to be the most lowlevel of the distros out there, but I've never tried either that or Gentoo, I'd love a comparision from somebody who has installed/maintained/used both for a significant amount of time.
>> You have to set fonts in many many places.
That's the biggest problem with fonts in Linux: Lack of an integrated and unified approach to font and display management. Too many developer egos and way too much NIH syndrome. Everyone does their own thing.
Regardless of the desktop or the window manager you use, you ought to able able to select and manage all your fonts from one single location. Any changes made there should be reflected across your system, in all areas and in all applications.
Today, KDE goes one way, Gnome goes another, openoffice a third way, and almost every other individual application goes its own way. These applications should allow individual customization, but should know and default to the choices you make for the system.
For example, Gnome allows me to select an "application" font. But my selection there isn't reflected in most of the applications I use. KDE takes a similar approach with equally mixed results.
The second biggest problem, not just regarding fonts, is whiney and arrogant developers and wanna-be developers who think Linux is their exclusive property and tell any user who ventures to make a suggestion or raise a criticism to "shut up and start coding". Someone needs to lock these guys in a room.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
I'd actually say that Linux is weak in supporting off-the-shelf games; however, there are numerous fun, high-quality games available Free and/or for free. KDE provides many addictive games and edutainment applications that I can't live without (speaking as a GNOME lover, when using Linux). GNOME also has many high-quality games (my favorites are Mahjongg and Robots). Then there many other favorites like Tux Racer, Frozen Bubble (like Snood), and GL Tron (you have to play this one) among others. Another really cool diversion is Celestia, which allows you to zoom around the galaxy and visit planets, moons, comets, astroids, spacecraft (like Hubble, the ISS, or even Friendship 1). And despite my premise, there are also quite a few commercial games for Linux. There are many fun games that run on Linux - some aren't even available for Windows or non-unix platforms! Check your favorite Linux Distribution for more examples.
It is impossible to enjoy idling thoroughly unless one has plenty of work to do.
- Jerome Klapka Jerome
So that said, the only disadvantage of Gentoo is compile time. Otherwise, it is the most consistent, clearly layed-out, well-documented, and generally user friendly distro out there right now. However that one disadvantage is a big one. Any speed increases gained by custom compiling for your system are usually offset by the fact that you are emerging something in the background while you work anyways.
Do you use an LCD or CRT monitor?
From the origional How to Decide if Linux is for you:
There are also many antivirus programs for Linux. A Free application is Clam AV. You can google for some proprietary alternatives if you wish.
It is impossible to enjoy idling thoroughly unless one has plenty of work to do.
- Jerome Klapka Jerome
Installing Fonts via KDE (at least in SuSE) is easy. In the KDE Control Center, System Administration, Font Installer.
Found this in 10 seconds. Just opened up the SuSE Linux User Guide book that comes in the boxed version, and looked in the Index for Fonts, section installing, and it exaplains where it is.
I just added the fonts I want (in Administrator mode), and activated them. They were then working in all my programs. I now have 1000+ different fonts installed on my system (not that I need that many)
Debian has also a ton of decent fonts (like the MS Core Fonts and the Vera fonts) available as packages.
Do you use an LCD or CRT monitor?
LCD mostly, but CRT sometimes; does it matter? Antialiased everything sucks ass no matter what it's showing on. I use the subpixel antialias on the LCD but even ClearType on XP on an LCD looks like ass when everything's antialiased.
I find that sub-pixel antialiasing actually sort of works on LCD monitors - especially for fonts such as Verdana or Tahoma, not so well for Times New Roman. On CRTs, the text is already sort of fuzzy so any kind of antialiasing makes things worse.
yes, I could just decrease the font size or disable anti-aliasing.. by re-compiling everything which conveniently neglects to have that option. Thanks!
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
Try manipulating fontconfig Add the following to ~/.Xresources or/and ~/.Xdefaults Xft.hinting:false Xft.hintstyle:hintnone This should smooth fonts
SuSE 9.1 and the previous versions I've used back to 8.2 have always had great fonts. I use YaST and YOU and am running the 2.6.5 kernel and I must say everything hums along really well. All of the programs in KDE (SuSE's preferred desktop) look beautiful, uniform and work great with eachother.
The fonts are not the issue:
I asked a friend why he disliked Linux:
1) No Start button.
2) Too much "power" (ie, shells).
3)Bad fonts.
4) The only system he had seen was a badly configuired "Whitebox" box.
I have fonts working fine, but i can't get java fonts look right. I'm using blackdown java and fonts look like crap. They are too big and they don't support any special charters. Is there any way to fix that ?
Since you're trying to sway people to linux, Gentoo might be too difficult for them to start on, but setting up fonts is easy. All you have to do is run emerge a few times and it downloads microsoft's corefonts and some other font packages. You may have to add the paths to the xorg.conf file or it does that for you, I don't remember. It's easy to do though.
The fonts on my system look very nice. Since I have a 15 inch laptop screen at 1600x1200 fonts can sometimes be a pain. They looked horrible in Windows XP because I had to increase the default font size and that threw everything off in certain programs. But fonts are really good on my desktop. Sans Serif is a really nice font and I use it all over my desktop.
I had problems with fonts in Mandrake, so that's what I'm comparing it too. Some programs in mandrake didn't look too nice.
...take a quick look at this to see where various distros (including Gentoo) come from. Yes, there are a whole lot (104) of Debian-based distros listed, but Gentoo isn't one of them.
that link should've been this.
My home computer generally has zero ports open. What are you going to do ? Sure I'm susceptible to DDoS, but so is anyone on a residential connection. There is always the possibility of a remote kernel exploit, but something like that will be public knowledge pretty quickly, and if it isn't public knowledge, then the people who know wouldn't be attacking your home computer. How many layers of security does the average person need ? Most people are behind a NAT anyway.
In Soviet America the banks rob you!
I'm quite fond of Luxi fonts, among which there is the Luxi Mono, which I perceive as the best-looking monospace font available. I would have posted screenshots if I had a good enough server ;-)
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing