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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?"
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.
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
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!
Last time I was in a school lab, the babysitter (she doesn't know squat, so that's all she is, really) chastised me for changing the monitor to 75Hz (the max it would do). Apparently, it "uses less electricity" at lower Hz. Thank goodness it only goes as low as 60!
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.
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.