Typography in Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex

One thing I’ll never unders­tand is why Ubuntu ships with such hideous default sys­tem fonts, when there are some per­fectly great open source fonts built right into it. For ins­tance, UnDo­tum is a near-exact clone of Fran­klin Gothic, although stran­gely a Goo­gle search for undotum "franklin gothic" only turns up one page that men­tions the two together. It seems to be an arbi­trary simi­la­rity, as the pur­pose of UnDo­tum and other UnFonts is to pro­vide Korean cha­rac­ters. Any­way, it makes a good win­dow title font.

Then there’s Nim­bus Sans, which is indis­tin­guisha­ble from Hel­ve­tica; DejaVu Sans, which as far as I can tell is a des­cen­dant of Fru­ti­ger (and, hence, a cou­sin of [Apple’s] Myriad and [Microsoft’s] Segoe UI), and makes a nice all-around sys­tem font; and Liber­tine, which makes for a great general-purpose body serif. Once you set these as the fonts in GNOME and in Fire­fox, everything looks sco­res bet­ter — bet­ter than Ubuntu’s default look, cer­tainly, and arguably bet­ter than Windows.