Meet ‘Oxygen’ – A Font for the KDE Desktop

By , Published December 28, 2011

It seems that no Linux desktop worth its salt is complete without its own font. GNOME 3 has Cantarell, Unity has ‘Ubuntu‘, and now KDE is getting in on the typographic trend.

Meet ‘Oxygen’.

kde oxygen font

oxygen font in use

‘for use with KDE’

The Oxygen font ‘is a project designed to produce a ‘..legible font to use within the KDE gui.’

It’s designed by Vernon Adams, whose other fonts include Muli and FontOne, of which the Oxygen font is partly derived.

It seems that work on the font has only just begun with no details on what weights are to be available – although a monospace variant is on the cards – or when users can expect to find Oxygen ready for download.

With the KDE being rather meticulous in its appearance, one feels that having its own font would benefit the KDE desktop immeasurably.

Further information on the font can be found @ code.newtypography.co.uk/?p=1906

Related posts:

  1. Ubuntu Font Family Update Adds Monospace Variant
  2. Oxygen theme for Google Chrome
  3. New font still on course for Ubuntu 10.10
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  • https://launchpad.net/~boniboyblue Christopher Boni

    When I read the title I thought this was going to be about Oxygen Android AOSP ROM.

    On topic, it’s really pretty.

  • https://launchpad.net/~shnatsel Shnatsel

    Finally free desktops started caring about typography!

    • Varttaanen

      Which is great! Typography FTW

    • http://profiles.google.com/bwat47 Brandon Watkins

      Yeah, we have some really nice fonts to choose from :) Personally, I am still in love with the ubuntu font, its so beautiful! This one looks pretty nice too.

  • Georgi Karavasilev

    I think “Hell Yeah!” phrase describes my opinion perfectly :)

  • Ian Hex

    From my Google+ post:

    Details are obviously sparse at the moment as the project is still very young, but I note two things:
    1. Not sure how I feel about those descenders yet;
    2. The basic skeleton, though, looks good for a nice, legible UI typeface
    though, it exhibits a large x-height, nice open counters and bowls and
    is humanist in principle.

    I shall be following its development closely. Promising start, though.

  • Satchit Bhogle

    I’m not terribly fond of it, from the little I’ve seen. It looks like a font that will not be very legible at small sizes. That said, every little bit helps.

  • http://twitter.com/davidjvcruz David Cruz

    Little error, the Gnome font is: Cantarell

  • Anonymous

    I always hated how fonts are looking in KDE. Hopefully, this new font will improve that

    • https://launchpad.net/~shnatsel Shnatsel

      Judging by the screenshots in the blog post font rendering is still so-so. Might be caused by uncommon order of pixels on the LCD from which the screenshot is taken, though.

      • http://fitoschidoblog.wordpress.com Fitoschido

         No hinting yet…

    • Anonymous

      Yes. Fonts look a little bit uglier in KDE by default. They just need a little tweak.

      Enable anti-aliasing, and disable font hinting.

      This should do the trick.

  • Anonymous

    Looks gorgeous. KDE graphic design team is really doing a great job.

  • Mohan

    Looks very good!

  • http://2buntu.com Roland Taylor

    This is great!

    • http://jackyalcine.co.cc Jacky Alcine

      He used Qt :P

      • http://2buntu.com Roland Taylor

         :D

  • Nikolaus Waxweiler

    I like the font :) Typography is very important, glad to see major desktops taking it seriously. Now KDE just needs to increase the default font size (and redesign all UIs where bigger fonts would look worse) and switch from hintfull to hintslight as the default, like Ubuntu did.

  • Daryl O.

    I like it … it looks a lot better than the Ubuntu font, which I’ve never cared for!

    • Marlito Macatunao

      how come you compared the two when you said you never cared for the other one?

      • Daryl O.

        Why wouldn’t I compare them?  They’re both similar in that one was specially designed for Ubuntu GNOME and the other was designed for KDE.  I happen to like this one a lot better.

        • http://fitoschidoblog.wordpress.com Fitoschido

           KDE or GNOME. That is completely unrelated to the font’s design, and it is not a valid argument to not like one font…

          • Daryl O.

            There must be a language barrier here, I guess.  That one was created for Ubuntu GNOME and the other, for KDE, has NOTHING to do with the design.  I compared the two fonts because they were both specifically designed for a desktop.  I prefer the look of this particular font over Ubuntu’s font.  I don’t need to argue that … that is my PREFERENCE, and I’m entitled to it.  If I had offended one of you two because you had helped design the Ubuntu font, I’m sorry, but I just don’t like it.

  • Stephan Goosen

    Actually, the fonts are one of the main reasons that I’m sticking with Kubuntu.  I love KDE, but everyone was always telling me not to use Kubuntu…  But, when I tried OpenSUSE 11.4, the fonts were immediately obvious, making the desktop feel, somehow… cheap.

    Since then, I’ve decided that Kubuntu gives me everything I want, and if I’m happy, why move to something else?

    And, although I’m happy to hear that KDE is getting it’s own font, I still very much prefer the Ubuntu font.  It’s unique enough to be recognizable, creative enough to go on “fun” things, and professional enough to go into business letters.  

    It’s somehow managed to hit what I can only imagine is an extremely delicate balance to make it good in almost any setting.

    And… I sometimes like to think of the Ubuntu font as a secret communication letting other people in the small Linux world know, “I’m one of you guys.”  (( I should probably get my head checked. ))

    • Ian Santopietro

      Agreed. The only Ubuntu doesn’t really work for is contexts where you need a serif font (for obvious reasons).

    • http://profiles.google.com/bwat47 Brandon Watkins

      Yeah, its pretty sad opensuse and fedora have really been ignoring font rendering because of ‘patent issues’. Ubuntu was the first distro to really have the balls to step up and add proper subpixel rendering out of the box. I remember I was simply amazed when I used the first beta of ubuntu 7.10. I loved linux, but font rendering was a HUGE issue for me, no matter what I did it looked terrible. When I tried 7.10 beta with the new font rendering patches it looked amazing and I immediately switched to ubuntu. Ubuntu still has the nicest out of the box rendering to this day.

      Right now I am using arch linux with ubuntu’s freetype, fontconfig, cairo, and libxft patches from the aur, looks great. 

      If you ever want to give suse another try I recommend trying the infinality patches. I still prefer ubuntu’s rendering, but infinality looks great as well. You can find opensuse packages here:
      https://build.opensuse.org/project/show?project=home%3Anamtrac%3Asubpixel

      • Chad Germann

        Excellent instructions for Fixing the Font rendering in OpenSuSE  can be found at this site

        http://susestarter.blogspot.com/2011/03/get-yer-subpixel-hinted-fonts.html

      • Stephan Goosen

        7.10!?  Was it really that long ago?  I remember joining the kubuntu users group, just to test out the new font.  But, I had no idea so much time had passed since then…

        It’s funny, at first the font was something to live with.  Then there was a fix if you added a personal ppa.  Then the font became mainstream…  And I haven’t worried about it since.

        • http://profiles.google.com/bwat47 Brandon Watkins

          The ubuntu font itself was introduced later, I’m talking about the initial font rendering patches that enabled bytecode interpreter, proper subpixel hinting, lcdfilter ect…

          Some distros, such as fedora and suse still don’t include all of these out of the box, making for sub-par font rendering on LCD screens.

          I actually dug up an old screenshot of my gutsy beta desktop:
          http://threatdown.deviantart.com/#/d13bd3b

      • http://twitter.com/alejandronova Ernesto Manríquez

        If you run Fedora, Infinality may be of interest to you. It’s the only patch set that’s definitely better than Ubuntu’s font rendering.

        http://www.infinality.net/blog/

        • http://profiles.google.com/bwat47 Brandon Watkins

          I actually still prefer ubuntu’s patches. Infinality does have more font rendering goodies, but still seems like beta software to me, The rendering can occasionally be inconsistent and buggy, especially with spacing. 

          I do love the new presets its introduced in the latest version though (win7 style, osx style ect…)

    • Samuel Orr

      It used to (and still does) annoy me when people would say “Don’t use Kubuntu use a real KDE distro like OpenSUSE”. I have used OpenSUSE and it is fantastic; I have used Kubuntu and it also was fantastic. There is nothing wrong with Kubuntu it was always a very high quality implementation of KDE.

      Please note I am a full time Debian user so I am not biased to either Kubuntu or OpenSUSE.

    • Nikolaus Waxweiler

      I too feel that KDE’s defaults (like on OpenSUSE, which I’ve used since 10.3) look cheap. Part of the reason why I never considered KDE polished… Taking the default hinting mode and font size of Ubuntu will be a very good start that will probably be only surpassed when Infinality’s FreeType patches hit mainline.

  • Will Moorhead

    That is an awesome font

  • http://profiles.google.com/lilianftp Moraru Lilian

    KDE is doing a great work. Such a great Desktop Environment.

  • http://xobb.citylance.biz Paul C

    More good fonts for computers. I’ve chosen Droid fonts for my experience though.

  • Anonymous

    It fits really well with the layout elements common to the Oxygen theme. I like it.

    You know, I’m just going to say it now- I really wish I hadn’t started using GNOME 3. It’s so damned convenient that, even though I love KDE, I just can’t use it for an extended period of time because it feels like I have to work to do the simplest things now. And I can use OS X at school, but I can’t imagine how people deal with Windows and OS X at home without integrated messaging, easy desktop management, and with all that excessive clutter and chrome on all their windows.

    I love KDE, but GNOME has brought my laziness to a whole new level, and it’s destroyed my ability to use anything else. T3T Somebody save me.

    • http://twitter.com/TheYoyoyoMan The Yoyoyo Man

      Same case here! But i think i’m way lazier than you because i use Easystroke to complete GNOME 3. It’s a total game changer man, if you’re as lazy as you said, you should give it a shot! Working on another DE has been a nightmare for me ever since ! 

  • atarixle

    This font looks really nice. It’s all I can say.

  • Anonymous

    Winter solstice for the North hemisphere happens when the North pole is tilted farthest away form the sun.  That’s actually the longest day of the year in the southern hemisphere… where it’s actually the middle of summer.

  • Seventh Reign

    Its a very nice font, but I cant really see anything special about it…

  • Yaseen Noorani

    Looks like a nice font!

  • http://scndgenesis.sourceforge.net Ifunga Ndana

    Nice

  • http://twitter.com/macram Manu Mateos

    This font is pretty nice :)

  • Anonymous

    I don’t know.  I don’t think every DE needs its own font.  I don’t know that KDE needs its own font.  Doing a font well, or “right”, requires an enormous amount of work.  Completing it with a family of complementary fonts (italic, bold, etc), kerning, ligatures, and non-ASCII characters…I’m not even a font designer, but I think I can fairly say that no one but font designers appreciate how much work it is.

    I fear that this new font will get made the default in KDE long before it is complete and ready–just like Nepomuk, Akonadi, PulseAudio, etc have been made the default ahead of their time–leaving users with a poor experience.

    It’s so hard to do a font “right” that I don’t think the FOSS world should embark to make yet another one now.  I know that each person has his own talents, but there is so much stuff in KDE that needs fixing first–i.e. the NetworkManager Plasma applet recently changed maintainers, and he’s redesigning the whole thing, and says he’s overworked…and that’s one of the most basic pieces of functionality a DE needs: the network management interface!  But in the meantime we have theoretical things like Akonadi and Nepomuk still trudging along, popping up errors on upgrades, and Dolphin having parts of it rewritten (STILL rewriting the file manager–Konqueror was fine)…and now we’re going to throw in a new font?  *sigh*

    KDE and Linux and the FOSS desktop movement would be so much further along if it didn’t keep reinventing the wheel.  You know, standing on the shoulders of giants and all that…

  • Andrew Smith

    If only non-ubuntu distros would fix their font rendering!

  • Anonymous

    Ahh kde needs work in terms of only font rendering really tired of trying various combinations but still love it.I am using it so don’t tell me you need to use it first.Using 3 diffrent kde distros and arch and Ubuntu :)

 
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