Help a little, make Fedora 10 a lot better

Jan Knutar shadowjksp at yahoo.se
Tue May 6 04:43:45 UTC 2008


Nicolas Mailhot wrote:


> Over all, we need more fonts so users can customize their desktop to the
> point they can't envision using something else than Fedora.

I would like Vista-style modal dialog accompanied with warning sounds and
grayscaling of the rest of the screen, telling me that 

"Warning, you just upgraded package X through yum, and X wants to modify
your font settings slightly, additionally you're currently running KDE and
completing the upgrade of X will launch a gnome application which will
launch the gnome settings daemon, which will also slightly change your
current font hinting and antialising settings, and possibly also adjust
your DPI by one or two units. Are you sure you want to continue?"

There's nothing more unsettling than having something about the fonts change
slightly, it's the same font but something's not right, but you can't quite
tell what it is. It's blurrier/softer than before, or rougher / grottier /
blockier than before, the size might be just slightly different too. You
enter new data in openoffice calc, and rows mysteriously become one or two
pixels higher as you press enter, but yet you're typing with the same font
and size that the rest of the cells are, or atleast that's what ooo claims.
You're feeling discomfort and perhaps a bit nauseous at first, a sensation
somewhat similar to motion-sickness. Application after application succumb,
either immediately or the next time you run them. Even konsole and
gnome-terminal that usually are so benign and rarely try to stab you in the
eyes turn evil! But they're often easier to get back on your side, and if
all else fails you've still got xterm, hopefully. For the rest, you spend
hours trying one font after another (or in the case of firefox,
combinations of 5 fonts) in different sizes, but you just can't make it
look the way it looked before... Heck, by now even if you'd stumbled on to
the original settings, you've changed so much else that it's still not the
same.

I wonder if I'm the only one who's wrestled with this :)

(And in this typing moment I just managed to get kmail and knode to look
like they used to, but then xchat went bad, and I had already made it look
like it used to... Or maybe I didn't get it to look like it did, just close
enough, and I got used to that close-enough version, and now that it's
really back to normal i'm getting discomfort from the slight change again?)

Sorry for this long rant :)




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