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There is a significant change on font rendering between. On Ubuntu version 22.04 was perfect as always but on version 24 is not.
On the right is version 22 and on the left 24. Icons look the same, but if you take a look at "Recent" you will notice. I installed tweaks and I tried changing anti-aliasing settings and changing the font from "Usubuntu Sans" to Ubuntu regular without improvement.

file_manager

Trying to make it a little bit more clear I performed a zoom between settings on both versions

enter image description here

Settings of Tweaks on ubuntu 24.04 or not grayscale but subpixel is not showing colors as before.

enter image description here

Does anyone knows what is happening?
It does not look terrible, but was looking better before. Lucky for me I have installed version 22 on a different partition.

Martin
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3 Answers3

12

As found in the 24.04 Noble Numbat release notes:

Updated Ubuntu font

A more modern slimmer version of the Ubuntu font family is now shipped as standard. Anyone wishing to return to the older Ubuntu font used in 22.04 can do so by installing the fonts-ubuntu-classic package.

So the difference you are seeing, if the screenshots are representative of how your monitor looks in-person, appear to be due to changes made to the default Ubuntu font itself, and could be overridden by running sudo apt install fonts-ubuntu-classic and selecting your default fonts accordingly.

Hope this helps,

johnandmegh
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    Thanks so much... this worked perfectly. The only thing I had to adjust was to set back the Hinting rendering to Slight on tweaks and select ubuntu font. – Martin Apr 28 '24 at 00:44
  • Also I found this page with more info and actions to prevent updates from overriding the classic fonts https://ubuntuhandbook.org/index.php/2023/04/restore-old-fonts-ubuntu-2304/ – Martin Apr 28 '24 at 15:13
  • Upgraded to 24.04 and couldn't figure out why my fonts now looked greyish. Ended up using non-antialiased fonts (aliased!?) for 2 months, as if I was in WinXP, until I found your solution! Thank you very much. – luigig44 Sep 14 '25 at 14:56
3

After different variants, the ugly fonts issue on Wayland Ubuntu 24.04 solved through the following. Choose Ubuntu font using Tweaks -> logout -> logon -> Check it, using magnifier Zoom from Accessibility

#------------------------------------------
# Font fixes
#------------------------------------------
sudo apt install -y fonts-ubuntu fonts-ubuntu-console


cp -i /usr/share/fontconfig/conf.avail/10-hinting-medium.conf ~/.fonts.conf


cd /etc/fonts/conf.d
sudo ln -s /usr/share/fontconfig/conf.avail/10-autohint.conf
sudo ln -s /usr/share/fontconfig/conf.avail/10-hinting-slight.conf
sudo ln -s /usr/share/fontconfig/conf.avail/10-hinting-medium.conf
sudo ln -s /usr/share/fontconfig/conf.avail/10-hinting-full.conf
sudo ln -s /usr/share/fontconfig/conf.avail/11-lcdfilter-default.conf
Cristian Florescu
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    I did that and I added: FREETYPE_PROPERTIES="truetype:interpreter-version=35 cff:no-stem-darkening=1 autofitter:warping=1" GSK_RENDERER=gl to /etc/environment and after reboot it woerked. – Aleksandar Pavić Feb 07 '25 at 19:31
-2

After days of debugging, this fixed it for me

Log out > Switch the Desktop session to X11 instead of Wayland > Login

Alya Gomaa
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  • Really? so basically you didn't find a solution. What you did was only stay on previous versions of things. To avoid and issue you will fall into thousand more. – Martin Dec 27 '24 at 13:26