Linux is Beautiful, or Why Robert Scoble Needs to Take Another Look

Posted by Daniel Stout on Sat 19 Aug 2006 at 1:06 AM

Robert Scoble wrote an entry about what he sees as a reason Linux won’t be adopted by the masses as their desktop operating system: the fonts. I couldn’t disagree more with him. I’m looking at Gnome via SUSE Linux 10.1 on an LCD screen, and gosh, darn it, these fonts are crisp, with subpixel anti-aliasing. My, they’re beautiful. But I’ll let you in on a little secret, I needed Microsoft’s help to make it all work. This is, in the final analysis, why I paid for Linux instead of just downloading it off the internet. Okay, here goes.

I love smooth type on an LCD screen, and I’m sure you would too if you see what I see. Fonts, typography, design. It’s all good in my eyes. But here’s where I’m different: I also really love Linux.

Scoble mentions that when he sees Linux users at conferences that the fonts on their screens look nasty. That’s probably true, as I’ve seen the same. Just like Windows XP has ClearType and any anti-aliasing turned off by default, so too Linux doesn’t force users to adopt to a cleaner lifestyle. A lot of people are slumming off with dirty fonts because they don’t know that life could be better. The typography on Linux can be very beautiful, and I’ll tell you how I achieved it.

The first was to turn on subpixel anti-aliasing. You can do this in both Gnome and KDE. I think all you KDE users should give it up and switch to Gnome. I used KDE for a while, and it is too similar to Windows. If you want to run Windows, you should just run Windows and forget about KDE. Gnome on the other hand is beautifully designed and a much more humane approach to windows managment. Okay, so start with Gnome and turn on subpixel anti-aliasing (go to the Gnome Control Center and click on Fonts).

Now here’s a little secret that most people don’t know: if you buy the boxed version of SUSE Linux as opposed to downloading the free version off the internet, you get a special installer that will download the Microsoft Core Web Fonts for you. This installer doesn’t come with the free version, which is what most people use. So if you pay for SUSE Linux, you’ll get fonts like Arial, Georgia, Times New Roman, Verdana, etc., which is what most of the internet uses for rendering websites. The cool thing is those fonts get used not just in the browser, but in other places in the operating system. So if you have the paid version of SUSE Linux, it just looks better. In fact, it looks beautiful.

Now if you’re thinking, I’m not going to pay $60 for every version of SUSE just to run some damn fonts, I understand. The cool thing is that you don’t have to. I bought SUSE 10.0 on DVD. Then when 10.1 was released, I simply downloaded the DVD image from the web and upgraded my Linux install(s) to 10.1. It worked wonderfully and best of all, it kept all of my fonts.

So in my opinion, Scoble, you got it wrong. Linux can be and is beautiful. It’s simply a matter of knowing what to do (just like in Windows XP). But you are definitely right when you say that the best fonts aren’t free. I paid to get SUSE Linux ($50.99 on Amazon), but it was the fonts that came with it that made it really valuable. The difference on the screen between the default free fonts and the fonts that come with a boxed version of SUSE Linux are huge.

My friends all thought I was crazy for paying for Linux, but my system looks and feels stellar. There is an advantage to paying for software. At least, sometimes. The cool thing about SUSE Linux and other distributions is that it comes with thousands of apps you can install for free. In fact, SUSE will install a nice selection of apps to get you browsing the web, doing email, watching video, and word processing. All the basic tasks you use your Windows machine for can be done on Linux plus a whole lot more (think: development).

I suppose you’re running a Vista beta, Robert, and I would hope the fonts look pretty on that. It took a gazillion developers 5 years and 50 million lines of code to get that thing to sail. But personally, I’d rather see the world from the cockpit of a lean Eclipse 500 6-seat jet than lumber through the skies with the Goodyear Blimp.

Update: Okay, so I’ve been told that you can get the Microsoft Core Web Fonts for Linux from this site on Sourceforge. And it’s a package in Ubuntu that you can simply install. Go grab it, if you don’t have it.

Update #2: If you’re using Linux, you can download this RPM file and install it. It contains most of the Microsoft Core fonts that you’ll want. I installed it, and it didn’t appear to contain Georgia. You can install Georgia, which is a great font by the way, by going to a Windows system and copying the four files named georgia*.ttf in C:\Windows\Fonts to your Linux system. You’ll want to copy them to /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/truetype. Make sure you’re logged in as root when you do that. Also, if you’re interested in more about fonts in Linux, check out this excellent page that has a lot of information.

Tags: fonts · gnome · linux · microsoft · open source · open suse · robert scoble · scoble · suse · suse linux · typography · vista · windows

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