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Update 2 - Alright folks, got some follow-up for you. You can see I’m considering some changes over at the Stacks repo. Sidenote: did you know our front-end library is open source and y’all can see what we’re up to?

Update 3 - The changes from round 2 are live, but with one notable exception: On Linux, we spec’d “Liberation Sans” and “Liberation Mono”. Did some digging on that PR and installed a few Linux VMs and found Liberation to be the best way to normalize across Linux distros. It also solves an issue where Ubuntu Mono—regardless of how you feel about the typeface—is smaller than its sans-serif counterpart.

Also noteworthy, we aren’t touching webkit antialiasing right now. I was reacting to a change in macOS 11.3 that removes the ability to set antialiasing at the OS-level. I hope it’s a bug, and is patched up in 11.4.

Plenty of little bugs to squash yet, and I’m chipping away at them. If something feels off on Windows, do revisit your ClearType settings. I’ve seen some folks realize with this switch that they were running some non-stock antialiasing.

Update 2 - Alright folks, got some follow-up for you. You can see I’m considering some changes over at the Stacks repo. Sidenote: did you know our front-end library is open source and y’all can see what we’re up to?

Update - These changes are now live!

Update 2 - Alright folks, got some follow-up for you. You can see I’m considering some changes over at the Stacks repo. Sidenote: did you know our front-end library is open source and y’all can see what we’re up to?

1. macOS and iOS continue to get San Francisco
2. Windows continues to get Segoe, but we drop system-ui since it isn’t quite ready for primetime.
3. Linux gets “Arial” which is never Arial, but often Liberation Sans, or Noto, but maintains the status quo.
4. Android gets Roboto, but we don’t specify it since it was clobbering Debian
5. If all else fails, sans-serif.

As for general font sizes, I think our fonts have always been too small. The base font size is 13px and we even show some bits of UI at 11px. I’ve got long term goals of bumping those up a point or two. I hear y’all with aging eyes. Mine are also aging—always have been, always will be 😛

I’ve read every comment and answer here and I think this strikes a balance between how we want to move forward and issues people have had in good faith. I’ll get to chipping away at the small issues once we iron out the bigger ones.

If this follow-up works, I’ll make sure to update the screenshots in this original post in a third update.

Update 1 - These changes are now live!