Discussion on:

Fedora 17 review: From miracle to meh

ArchLinux. As often said on the forums, it is as stable as you make it. I' ve been running Arch for 2 years now, and stability is not an issue. It runs fine, day after day, on both a desktop and laptop. Keep things down to what you really need, avoid the testing depot for production machines, and you're good to go. Installing looks like a chore, but it's faster than it seems, and you should technically only install it once for the life of the computer.

Basically, everything on your computer is your choice, so if you don't care for some choice you made, you just change it. No need to reinstall!

I've been using Fedora sense it was Redhat. I always do a full install formating all partitions except /home. A quick trip to mjmwired for the trained-monkey-routine and all is good. While I usually check out Gnome on first boot it's back to KDE for the next 6 month run.

Nirvana!

I don't have an 'official' fedora 17 install, I was running rawhide and the repos got frozen in preparation for the upcoming release. (rc stages) Once this freeze occurs I think the rawhide repos for whatever the version become links to the official release repos. In order to keep using rawhide you have to change repos, in this case to fedora 18.

It's been running great since day 1, with only one problem along the way that got fixed within 2 days. (broadcom wireless) I don't see any unreadable text like your screen shots. Maybe because I doinked around with themes and don't use the default.

I hadn't noticed the verdana thing. I'll look into that and see if I have a problem.

BTW I'm not clear on one thing; are you saying the rpm fusion packages were uninstalled? Or were they broken by the upgrade? Either way, simply reinstalling them may do the trick. That fs shuffling is buggier than you might imagine. (especially if prior to the upgrade your /usr was on it's own separate partition) Using the upgraded installer might place some critical link somewhere that was in a different location in f16 and prior.

First thing I do with a new browser installation is set default font to serif (and try disallowing sites from setting their own fonts, but sometimes that is a losing battle, and I have to "pick my battles").

Oh, right, I guess you do not have visual issues with one's, ell's, capital i's, "blending" together ( 1lI ), and other groupings with lots of vertical ascenders as some of us do - especially with the vague grey font "color" that is so much in vogue on web sites now. I guess the younger (or "hip" older) web designers like to exclude us geezers and other visually impaired folks from their messterpieces.

Still, you have a legitimate gripe - I would be just as outraged if I could not choose serif fonts to help me see the text better.

I'm stealing that one, it's a natural.

Serif fonts were invented to improve readability in print media by creating a sense of line-continuity when reading. As it happens, sans serif fonts are more readable in active displays (that is, displays that actually radiate light rather than merely reflecting it) such as CRT and LCD monitors, because serifs create visual clutter that makes the characters indistinct. There are exceptions for cases where a sans serif font is badly designed so that there aren't sufficient cues for differences between some characters, but there are serif fonts that do similar damage to readability through poor design, so that's hardly a one-sided argument.

That's what's wrong with a serif font, at least on a computer screen. Other factors come into play, such as color schemes (as you mentioned) and kerning, of course, but that does not particularly bear on the specific question of what's wrong with a serif font.

For me serif is more readable on displays, although not all serif fonts are so readable by any means - I do have to experiment with display/page/color scheme/browser combinations to see which one works best for me in a given situation. Sometimes I can tolerate some sans serif renditions in the interest of saving that tweak time, but it is almost always sub-optimal for me. Lots of those vertical ascenders, as I mentioned above, will impel me to find relief with the tweaking.

YMMV

It sounds like the real problem that bugs you about sans serif fonts is bad font design. There's a lot of bad font design out there, especially for sans serif fonts (because that's what all the cool kids are tweaking these days).

I'm a longtime Fedora user and haven't had any of those problems with Fedora 17. The problem you're having is more of an issue with upgrading directly from Fedora 16, possibly without having enabled RPMFusion during the upgrade process itself. With an ordinary fresh install these problems should not crop up.