ThoughtFactory.CreateThought() A random collection of thoughts from an easily bored developer

When You Assume..

I, like many others, have never thought of Linux as a "pretty" operating system, instead choosing to think of it as the home of "best effort" programmer-designed GUIs and "command line first" design.

This line of thought has set my expectations for my desktop Linux environments at home. When I switched to running Linux as my main Desktop machine 18 months ago I noticed that the fonts were nowhere near as nice as my Mac and Windows machines. Blindly assuming that Ubuntu didn't support ClearType, I simply went about my business and put up with the horrible fonts.

That was up until today, when I finally decided to investigate. It turns out that Ubuntu fully supports ClearType (although they call it "subpixel smoothing"), it's just turned off by default. There's even a handy GUI for turning it on. I'm never going to assume that my OS has to look like a dog's breakfast ever again.