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Jeremy's rant of font on Linux

Jeremy was frustrated with font on Linux, he has tried to do a simple task to have a decent view on 3 different browsers (of course, all running under Linux): Mozilla Firebird, Mozilla, Konqueror. Well, page on Firebird and Konqueror look crappy, Mozilla get the smooth-edged font right. Mozilla and Konqueror appeared to have the same fonts chosen but showing different result. Mozilla Firebird is still displaying the original font name for users to choose, something like *-adobe-*-time… (yes, that’s pain in the ass when you need to figure out what it is).

I don’t really know what’s the cause, but I do know how it feel. Back to the days where I had to configure my own Linux environment, I got to spent over 10 hours in front of the monitor, just to make the window look good. Certainly techniques to using TrueType font and XFT have been existed for a long time, and I am sure most of the Linux distribution put them on by default. So you ain’t gonna face this problem if you just install some distribution and using it with default option. The pain would come when you want to tune something. Is Linux ready for Desktop? To certain extend, I think the answer is yes. It got the environment for you to get the jobs done, it got the beautiful window manager which fairly perform most of UI job. However, if you tried to customize/configure something or you’re having some not-so-supported hardwares, Linux isn’t quite friendly to most of the users. Unless you got the know how, you won’t be out of the mess.

In my opinion, X Windows is the single biggest burden for Linux to be the desktop to compete other modern system. Lots of known techniques and solutions to well-known problems aren’t quite being aware. Linux kernel, filesystems are stable and reliable, lots of open source tools greatly improve productivity, but on UI side like font or printing issues are quite competitive to their rivals. These problems got existed solutions, but why people would still be bothered? Is it too many choices where different techniques applied by different distributions? Or the know-how is too difficult to access?

I’ve been using WinXP for the font. Maybe it’s time to try the latest Redhat 9 to check how’s the current Linux distribution answers to the desktop requirement. For sure we’d need trivial issues like font and printing to be working at the first place, then we’d talk about Linux for the desktop computing environment.