Today’s Daily 5 offers up 5 alternative fonts for use in Ubuntu as the System font (the one that you seen on menu’s, buttons, etc). The default font in Ubuntu â” âSans’ (actually Déjà Vu Sans) â” isn’t the greatest choice â” it’s wide, defaulted at a rather large size &, above all else, not as good as the competition â” Liberation Sans (created by Red Hat and largely based on Microsoft fonts) are an oft-mooted suggested replacement. But what else is there? Let’s take a peekâ¦
System fonts can be easily configured and adjusted in the âFonts’ section of Appearance properties (System > Preferences > Appearance > Fonts)
Aurulent Sans
A humanist sans serif font specifically designed for use with user interfaces. It’s extremely pleasant to look at with crisp readable lines â” a great default system font.
Droid Sans
A font commission by Google for their Android operating system, Droid is primarily designed for use with smaller screened and mobile devices. Nevertheless it looks beautiful used as a system font. The fonts are free to use and licensed under the Apache license.
UnDotum
UnDotum, derived from Korean LaTeX fonts, is packaged in pretty much every Linux distribution. I have always found it to be an incredibly readable and well proportioned font that works exceptionally well as a System font.
UnDotum is preinstalled in Ubuntu.
Verdana
One of the most widely used and well known âhumanist’ Sans-Serif fonts, Verdana is preinstalled with Windows and is one of the standard âweb’ fonts. It’s popularity is based on solid reasons and, perhaps unsurprisingly, Verdana makes a great system font.
FreeSans
Part of the GNU Freefont package, FreeSans is a free and open-source âSans Serif’ font descended from Helvetica.
FreeSans is preinstalled in Ubuntu