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by matheusmoreira 644 days ago
Proprietary OS problem. Linux distributions package and distribute all the fonts they're legally allowed to ship. Every font I ever cared to use can be found in the repositories. And they don't strip out features either. I get to customize everything about Fira Code.
2 comments

> Every font I ever cared to use can be found in the repositories.

If you have to download/install them separately then it means it doesn't ship with it. The fact that you can install it from the distro repositories means nothing to a third party website that can't assume you have done so.

Websites can't really assume anything that's not a web standard. If this is important to them, they should be lobbying the web standards bodies to come up with a list of fonts that browsers are required to make available. Then the browsers will pull them in as dependencies when they're installed.

The Linux distributions did their jobs with excellence. The fonts are all there and installing them is a oneliner. The web folks made their own OS though so if anyone is to be blamed it's whoever is in charge of that OS called the web platform.

Who's in charge of the web as a platform these days? Google. Who is no doubt profiting from the Google Fonts thing.

correct. that's why I mention the nerdfonts as the holy grail.

but without the big OSes agreeing on a new unicode, today it's technically impossible to have a single unicode font (see how noto ships 200 variants on linux, all having some 500mb and only differing a few chars from one another. it's a monstrosity)