Trade-offs

Posted Oct 10, 2025 17:57 UTC (Fri) by WolfWings (subscriber, #56790)
In reply to: Trade-offs by farnz
Parent article: Last-minute /boot boost for Fedora 43

For a boot/text console the dimensions flatly do not matter, nothing except the reported screen resolution matters for font selection IMHO.

If it's at least 1280x800? Chuck the 16x32 font at it. Always. 8x16 fonts were from the 640x400 days, not even 640x480. And the 4x6 kernel font was added to handle early low-res 320x200 and similar micro-screens.

I don't want my letters to be 4x6 pixels just because I'm on a cheap hotel 40" 720p TV for the night and it tries to pick the font closest to 12 points tall.

If I've got the pixel budget for large, readable fonts the text console should use it as long as I get at least 80x25, or some other tunable if Linux decides a larger console is the minimum now.

Trying to match to a specific physical size is a printing/publishing issue and only tangentially a window-manager one, not a text console one. If anything I'm constantly fighting the "fixed physical size" attempts because they result in blurry webpages and other things from trying to force-rescale bitmaps by single digit percentages.

Font size on the text console

Posted Oct 13, 2025 15:55 UTC (Mon) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link]

Arguably, you should always be aiming for the largest font that gets you a usable row by column size up until the user logs in and can configure the console to suit themselves. Yes, having 80x25 text on my big monitor results in huge characters, but that's a better failure case than having 564x250 on a smartphone screen and being unable to read it without a magnifying glass.

And it's worth noting that physical dimensions aren't enough to know what the "right" font scale is for a screen - you need not just the size of the monitor (in mm) and resolution (in pixels), but also the viewing distance to determine whether this should be treated as a "retina" display or not, since the relevant physical fact is how many pixels affect the same cone/rod on the retina, not how many pixels there are in an inch. A screen that's very close to your eyes (AR glasses, VR headset) needs a much higher pixel density than a monitor at arm's length to look good with a given set of decisions around anti-aliasing and font shaping.