thelinuxfraud

The reason all comes down to a single font type.

One of the best things about Linux is that you can customize and theme your desktop experience in almost anyway that you can think of. You can make it look like MacOS and even Windows if you’re into that kind of thing. Or, you can make it look completely different in every way. You can use desktop environments or you can use standalone window managers. Linux truly gives you choice and that’s what many people love about it.

I have themed my desktop ever since I started using Linux. I’ve themed GNOME, KDE Plasma and tiling window managers. Since I can remember, I have always used the Nord color scheme because let’s face it – It’s awesome! Seriously, if you don’t know about the Nord theme – check it out https://nordtheme.com/

Now, applying the Nord theme to GNOME or Plasma is very easy. You just install the theme (or any other theme that you want) from https://gnome-look.org, and then you apply it in your settings. Theming a tiling window manager is a little different, but still relatively easy after you do it once or twice. Also, it doesn’t matter what distribution that you are on because you can apply themes to any distro. Although, there is something that you can’t get on every distribution – at least not in my experience.

There is a font called *joypixels* which enables icons/emoji styled fonts that you can use throughout your system. On Arch it’s very easy to install because the joypixels font is right in the Arch repos. With a simple **sudo pacman -S ttf-joypixels** you’ve got the font installed. This is not possible on a distro, say for example, like Fedora. Both distros are obviously free and open source software but the difference is what software they allow in their repositories. Fedora will not allow any proprietary software in their repos, but Arch has no problem with it. Well, the joypixels font isn’t open source software which means that you can’t just easily install it on something like Fedora. I believe that goes for distros like Debian and Ubuntu as well, but don’t quote me.

Anyway, the reason that Arch has ruined every other distribution for me is because it literally has everything. If a package you need isn’t in the repos, you can easily get it from the AUR and being able to do that means that you never have to worry about *not* having the packages that you want and need. Because it’s so easy to get any package, it makes it tough when you jump to a different distribution and have to jump through so many hoops just to get a single fucking font.

So, thank you, Arch. You have trapped me and I don’t see myself using any other distribution in the future.

Thanks for reading my convoluted blog post.