Revisiting fonts-recommended
Hi Adam et al.,
now that Trixie has been released with fonts-recommended 2, I'd like to
take the opportunity and revisit this list of our recommended font
packages "just in time" before the next Debian release.
For example, the list currently contains the following choices that I
find questionable:
# GNOME's default
fonts-cantarell,
GNOME has just changed its default from fonts-cantarell to
fonts-adwaita-sans which is some variation of fonts-inter. Should we
keep fonts-cantarell or follow suit?
# Windows compat: Comic Sans (lord Marduk save us...)
fonts-comic-neue,
I don't think we need this at all anymore.
# emojis: emoji presentation (color, doesn't work with many programs)
fonts-noto-color-emoji,
Not sure if we need this. I think I have never encountered a color emoji
in written text. The only occurances seem to be web browsers which ship
their own set of emoji fonts nowadays (e.g.
/usr/lib/firefox/fonts/TwemojiMozilla.ttf
).
# wide Unicode coverage
fonts-freefont-otf,
This font is ugly. Its LGC glyph set is identical to the ones in
"fonts-urw-base35 | fonts-texgyre" which are already pulled in.
I'd recommend to replace this with fonts-unifont, which is even uglier,
but at least has a distinguishable style and contains a glyph for each
data point in Unicode
(https://salsa.debian.org/fonts-team/fonts-recommended/-/merge_requests/2).
# superior Courier
fonts-courier-prime,
Not sure if we need this. Who needs Courier anyway?
# programming fonts
fonts-firacode | fonts-mononoki | fonts-ricty-diminished,
I have recently switched from fonts-firacode to fonts-jetbrains-mono and
would recommend everybody to do the same. ;)
# general purpose fonts
fonts-league-spartan | fonts-clear-sans,
Not sure what "general purpose" means, but if we are talking about
"document fonts", I'd rather have one of fonts-gentium-* (OMG, why are
there 4! source packages for this?) oder fonts-linuxlibertine here.
Please share your thoughts, thank you!
- Fabian
Reply to: