This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/fedora by /u/yongminko on 2023-07-13 20:05:07.

I am very much puzzled by this so I’d like to get some help on this here.

I use both a MacBook and a Linux laptop for work. Whenever I switch to the Linux laptop, my eyes get some burning sensation and they get easily tired. This only happens on the Linux laptop and not on the MacBook. My Linux is Fedora 38 Silverblue with GNOME. I mostly just use a terminal (Foot) and a web browser (Firefox) on Linux (and sometimes VSCode).

I tried a bunch of things to resolve this, and now I am suspecting that the thickness of the fonts is one of the culprits, as my MacBook’s fonts look thicker than the Linux laptop’s fonts, and I feel that those fonts are easier on my eyes. (This is all based on how my eyes “feel” so I am not actually sure at all)

In any case, I’d like to try and see if I can somehow get the fonts thicker on my Linux laptop. I’ve tried the following.

  • I learned that you could use the “embolden” option from fontconfig, and I tried it on one of the fonts I use (the one for my terminal). It indeed made the font thicker, but it was too much. And I am not sure if I can do that globally. I didn’t change things like hinting and antialiasing (the defaults are slight and grayscale), but I don’t know if they matter. I also tried the “weight” option but it doesn’t seem to change anything.
  • This post talks about setting FREETYPE_PROPERTIES, which I tried, but didn’t seem to make any difference.
  • This post suggests to use different fonts. So I googled and tried the instructions here, which tells you to get Google fonts, gives you a .fonts.conf, and shows you which fonts to use for Firefox. It wasn’t really about making fonts thicker (but I tried anyway), and so obviously the fonts didn’t become thicker. Also, later I looked at the list of fonts on my machine, and it looked like the Google fonts were already installed on Fedora 38 (Noto Sans, Droid Sans, etc.), so I am not sure if getting Google fonts was necessary. (I didn’t verify if those fonts were identical though.) I didn’t really notice a lot of difference with tuning fonts with the provided .fonts.conf either. So I reverted back.
  • In the similar spirit of trying out different fonts, I installed two packages from here, fontconfig-font-replacements and fontconfig-enhanced-defaults. I am not sure if that made any difference though since I didn’t really notice a lot of improvement. So I rolled back.
  • This post talks about copying the font settings from Slackware 14.2 to Fedora 30, but I am not sure if it’s still applicable to Fedora 38. I could try, but I haven’t.

Maybe I am missing some of the other things I tried. One issue I have is that these posts are somewhat dated (or some of them are very old actually), so I am not sure if they are applicable to Fedora 38.

So in the end, I still don’t know how to get thicker fonts. Does anyone have ideas to try for me?