Noto

The Noto family consists of over one hundred Unicode-compliant fonts for different scripts. Many distributions install all of them by default, in the name of being inclusive. However, installing all of them significantly increases the scrolling required in the applications’ font fields. For convenience, I recommend sorting through the Noto fonts and disable any that you do not use regularly. KDE Plasma uses Noto as the default desktop font (Figure 5).

Figure 5: Noto has the most complete international support available today. Shown here is Noto Serif for Western European languages.

Oxygen

Oxygen is a geometric font created for KDE Plasma. It is available in several sans serif weights, as well as a monospace version. In all versions, the regular strokes and round bowls of its letters makes for high legibility. Although designed for online viewing, Oxygen also provides a clean minimalist look in hard copy (Figure 6).

Figure 6: Plasma’s Oxygen is primarily for online viewing.

Bitstream Vera Sans and DejaVu

Released in 2003, Vera Sans was one of the first open source fonts to be widely used. Its monospace typeface is still used for coding, thanks to its high legibility, but today the sans serif version has been largely replaced by DejaVu, which is partly based on Vera Sans. DejaVu has more international characters, plus a serif version based on Bitstream Charter (Figure 7).

Figure 7: Looking for Vera Sans? You probably won’t find it. DejaVu Sans, shown here, was designed to replace it.