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Comment by vasdae | Hacker News Reader

https://pointieststick.com/2023/10/27/these-past-2-weeks-in-...

KDE should pay attention to font families and sizes. This looks really cheap.

The font used in Plasma is Noto Sans and the reason we (I'm a kde developer) use it is because it has a very large support for all language in the world, which makes it an appropriate default.

It does? It looks great to me: clear and very readable. What's cheap about it? Or, alternatively, what would not look cheap?

The fonts look ugly to me as well. As I read the news on the middle east, I was distracted by the beauty of this font.

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/israel-middle-east/articl...

It is DISTRACTINGLY beautiful, especially the numbers. I'd rather have ugly fonts than forget everything but the way the numbers of people looked here.

Huh. I guess I must be aesthetically impaired. That font doesn't look any more or less beautiful to me than the KDE one. It's just different. They're both fine to my eyes.

It's just my opinion. Yours is just as valid. The KDE font looks like a basic font with AA. Both are fine to me too, but this font was distracting to me. As a font it fails to convey as much information to me but I LOVE the text. This site is very SEO written but has great readability although the font I'd consider ugly, it's very usable and functional. https://www.linearity.io/blog/old-english-font/

random font tangent as an ignorant Westerner, but the Arabic writing system is incredibly beautiful, and there are many incredibly beautiful fonts, yet I often see fonts that look like they're welded together from PVC pipes. no slant at all, uniform weight, lots of circular bends. do these look ugly to native Arabic speakers too, or just to my Western aesthetics?

Not an Arab or speaker of any languages that use the alphabet but yes despite it having the potential to be very beautiful, most of the typaces they use are very ugly.

This free font is very nice though, and I set it to be the default whenever Arabic needs to be displayed on my computer: https://www.amirifont.org/.

To me this one feels cluttered, way too much going on. Definitely distracting, but I wouldn't call it beautiful.

I think the kerning is slightly off, looking at the end of the word "Their".

Fonts in screenshots do look a bit microsofty (cheap and low quality) to be honest. But fortunately fonts are trivial to install and change in kde.

What qualities about it make is seem cheap and low quality to you? I'm genuinely curious, because I'm not understanding this...

Looks thin and enlarged. Somehow “weak” - i dont know how else to describe it. Not a major issue, and is subjective. When i dont like fonts i just install others, its trivial.

Yes, I agree it's a trivial "issue". It's not even really an issue, especially because it's just a default that is easily changed to suit anyone's taste. I'm just interested in getting a glimpse of how others view the world.

It has absolutely no personality. If you go to a font search engine and look for "plain" you probably get that one.

Sure, it's plain -- but that doesn't seem like a bad thing for a default font in a utilitarian UI. In any case, is it the lack of frills that makes it seem "cheap"?

I like the the way KDE looks and operates, the fonts are clear and easy to read. Please KDE developers keep them as they are, KDE is great!

Yeah, one of the first things I do on a KDE install is to set all the fonts to Inter[0]. It helps a lot but still doesn’t fix KDE’s selection of text sizes and weights which has always felt odd to me.

[0]: https://rsms.me/inter/

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