please lets don’t misunderstand: I love openSUSE.
Best features (btrfs on top), a very good choice of desktop environments and a positive constructive community vibe across a lively and well structured forum.
Now what I don’t like: well, compared to the other Gnome distro I just tried (Manjaro Gnome community edition and Fedora) the default font look so ugly and almost unreadable.
This is noticeable especially when browsing the net (Firefox) or using the terminal (Gnome Terminal)… and it’s pretty annoying
Has anyone of you recently tried those distros and knows what I’m talking about?
It’s a real pity, goes otherwise overall quality of openSUSE is very high.
I doubt it’s a patent specific issue, otherwise Fedora will have the same problem too.
What about if it’s something that the majority of the community doesn’t care about (really?!) to make that a possible and well advertised offered option through a “1click install” link.
I’m not jocking, unfortuanately if you tried other distros before the first feeling post installation is underwhelming.
Good looking fonts are extremely subjective, but I agree with you that out of the box, web fonts are particularly heinous on certain websites. Reddit, among others, is absolutely horrible on an OpenSUSE default install.
I can offer a few suggestions that might help, if you happen to like the same font “look” that I do.
Have you installed the Microsoft Web Fonts? Reach out and grab them with “sudo zypper install fetchmsttfonts”
Under Gnome Tweak tool, set your fonts to “Hinting = Slight” and “Antialiasing RGBa”
In Firefox Preferences/Content/ Fonts and Colors section, set your fonts to Default “Arial”. Click “Advanced” and set Serif: “Times New Roman”, Sans Serif: “Arial”, and Monospace: “Courier New”
Restart the browser and see what you think. I made a few changes with /etc/sysconfig Editor for fonts as well, mainly setting USE_LCDFILTER to lcddefault, but I’m not sure if that actually made any changes.
It’s odd that so many are failing on unpacking… corrupted downloads I guess? I just re-ran that install script as a test and it successfully grabbed them all again for me. Just force a re-run of that installer with “sudo zypper in -f fetchmsttfonts” and see if subsequent attempts get the ones that failed.
As far as the terminal fonts, I seem to recall them being ugly on initial install as well, though I didn’t pay them much mind. I knew I’d be fixing them when I was settling into my new install… I used to distro-hop a lot and like you said, some distro’s ship with really nice font rendering and some don’t. It’s just one of those things that had a 50-50 chance of me having to tweak.
Now they look fine though (IMO… see below).
Let me know if you still aren’t satisfied and I’ll try and make sure I didn’t change something else that I’m forgetting about
