GNOME has announced a change to its default UI and monospace fonts ahead of the upcoming GNOME 48 release — a typographic turnabout that won’t impact Ubuntu users directly, though.
Should you feel a sense of deja vu here it’s because GNOME trialled a font switch last year, during development of GNOME 47. Back then, it replaced its home-grown Cantarell font with the popular open-source sans Inter font (trivia: used by Zorin OS).
The change was reverted prior to the GNOME 47 due to various UI quirks, coverage issues, and compatibility (thus underlying the importance of testing things out prior to making wholesale changes).
Now, GNOME is trying again ahead of GNOME 48 —with a different font.
Well, a semi-different font.
GNOME is swapping it UI font from Cantarell to a modified version of Inter it’s named Adwaita Sans.
And it’s adding a new monospace font called Adwaita Mono to replace Source Code Pro. Adwaita Mono is a modified version of Iosevka that it has ‘customised to match Inter’.
An interesting but not impactful change for Ubuntu users. Ubuntu 25.04, out in April, will include GNOME 48 but it will, as it has been since 2017, come customised with Ubuntu’s branding, patches, and various preinstalled GNOME Shell extensions.
But just because Ubuntu doesn’t follow upstream GNOME’s font choices doesn’t mean you can’t.
GNOME’s new Adwaita fonts may be packaged in the plucky archives so anyone keen to swap the Ubuntu font for Adwaita Sans and/or Ubuntu Mono for Adwaita Mono may be able to.
Let me know what you think of the new GNOME font choices and how they compare to Cantarell by leaving a comment!