Fonts are like my dotfiles, I fucked with fonts.conf a decade+ ago and have just lived with that since then.

So I get to be very particular, but also not have to care about tweaking, I did all the work back when I had time for that.

I will argue that if you stare at a screen for hours a day, might as well make it pleasant with good hinting/anti-aliasing/features and a professional font instead of Dejavu Sans lol

I wish this viewpoint were more common/well-known. Somehow people get it in their head that people are tinkering with all their stuff constantly and never working, but just as TFA says, you'll have configs that haven't changed in over 6 months and are customized to your liking so you can work more efficiently and comfortably. Get a new PC? rsync configs over, or git clone your dotfiles repo or whatever. The work you put in doesn't disappear.

I wish I could tinker with the font on this website. It flickers as it scrolls and does my head in!

It's the scanline effect, here's three lines of JS to disable it from the developer console

    s=document.createElement('style');
    s.textContent='body::after{display: none !important}';
    document.body.appendChild(s)

I maintain a personal dotfiles repo on github, and when I start at a new job etc, I just git clone my dotfiles repo and then run ./setup.sh and everything is set up nicely with my fonts, colors, and stuff. It didn't take much effort at all and I get to use what I like. And I haven't tweaked my dotfile in years.

And from an accessibility standpoint, default fonts and colors are very safe as well. They tend to be easier to see and process.

I still tinker as I get older, except instead of fonts I'm buying a dual monitor setup with a 6-foot standing desk.

My life hack for switching fonts - buy a Berkeley Mono license so I cannot possibly use any other font bc I’d be wasting money. Nice font too.

Feeling the same. I used to have a highly customised Liunx setup, then I got a macbook from work and hated everything that was different from what my linux desktop did. But eventually you just get over it and realise it's all fine and works. Being unfamiliar with something is different from it being bad.

^^^ this, with life coming more to the ending part you start to value your time that you got left

tinkering is good when you're < 30 or maybe even < 25

> No time spent learning, is time wasted.

From TFA.

If you don't want to tinker, don't! But it's absurd to suggest that it's only something for children to enjoy. (30 should not be considered near the end of your life btw.) Please don't tell others they should feel bad about learning for fun because they're adults.

Tinkering is good no matter how old you are, this is weird gatekeeping

Or in this case, tinkering with fonts simply reduces legibility.

Tinkering with fonts is the only way to get fonts that improve legibility by replacing ambiguous glyphs with unabiguoius. ie programmer fonts. Every day it boggles my mind that password managers use fonts that don't distinguish 1Il| 0O etc. cut & paste does not help when you need to speak them into a phone or type them into some other device. Same applies to simple part numbers, serial numbers etc, just all data.

Something I say about complainers applies here:

In the entire history of the world not one thing has ever gotten better by accepting something as it is.

Go ahead and never tinker, but don't delude yourslef it's a virtue. It's merely something you're free to do because it doesn't actively harm anyone else.