In the beginning of my experience, it wasn't that computers had fonts so much as each computer had A Font, and that was how the computer talked to you. All of them were quite low resolution; blocky and bad.

Now I expect every character to be drawn in an appropriate …

One thing that UNIX users have that Mac and Windows users don't: it's generally quite easy to change their window manager theme -- and to write/draw their own.

Window decorations -- a frame, a titlebar, some buttons -- are handled by the X11 window manager, which is itself a replaceable part. Window …

Do you have an X11 application that insists on using a font you hate?

Change that easily with fontconfig.

This syntax in your .fonts.conf will change the response for one font into an answer from another:

<alias>
 <family>Gentium</family>
 <prefer>
  <family>Tex Gyre Pagella</family>
 </prefer>
</alias>

Add …