Funny fonts
I’ve just installed Linux Mint. It was very easy and it’s great, but the fonts are awful, as they have always been on Linux. The first thing I did was increase the font size to 15 in the system preferences, and turn on hinting to full. This made fonts look fuzzy, but at least they aren’t jagged.
But on some websites, the fonts are still jagged. I tried installing Fontconfig and editing fonts.conf to force no bitmap fonts anywhere and to always use Liberation Sans for everything, but this had no effect. What’s a good way to get better-looking fonts?
Neil says…
It’s not something I hear people complain about these days – font rendering used to be a real mess – but browsers can also cause their own issues. So, it does depend if you mean system-wide or just a browser problem. Open the System Settings in Linux Mint and in the Fonts/Appearance section, set Font Rendering to Default or Restore Default Fonts. We recommend rebooting to ensure everything is applied.
If it’s a case of missing default fonts, you can try installing the generic Microsoft web fonts with:
$ sudo apt-get install msttcorefonts
If you’re still having rendering issues, you might want to try flushing the font cache with:
$ fc-cache -fv
Cute Krita
I’m looking into switching from Windows to Linux. I have been considering this for a while but the main art package I use isn’t available for Linux. However, with changes to Windows 12, I’m being given more of a push to jump and was looking at GIMP and Krita.
What I’m stuck on, however, is finding a good Linux distro to try. I would like something that provides as novice-friendly an experience out of the box as I can get. However, it needs to play well with Huion art tablets and art software like Krita and GIMP, and also work for gaming.
My three main contenders are Ubuntu, Kubuntu and Pop!_OS, all primarily because of how well established and widely used they are, so I would have access to a lot of support. If anyone has any insight, personal experiences of how these distributions perform with art and gaming, or better suggestions, I would like to hear them.
Neil says…
I hate to say it, but you can run GIMP and Krita on Windows, so ideally you should try them out before doing anything drastic. Having said that, it’s great that you want to shift over to Linux and, honestly, any of the three distros you’ve mentioned should offer a decent experience. The Huion drivers are natively support
