For a long time, I’ve just put on DejaVu fonts and been done with it. Generally good enough Unicode coverage for me. But I know it’s been years since DejaVu’s been updated, and I wonder what’s very common today.
[As for the terminal, I’m guessing it’s usually still the standard fixed Unicode fonts?]
My EndeavourOS (and the prior Manjaro distro) had all of them installed.
All. Of. Them.
I am so tired of having to scroll through hundreds of Noto fonts to get to the later ones, but I'm afraid, if I uninstall one, something will break on reboot.
Ubuntu uses their own font family. I think it’s one of the only distributions with its own custom font, but I might be wrong. The Unicode coverage of the Ubuntu font is not very big compared to Google’s Noto font family, which many distributions switched to as default. But it mostly depends on the DE — Gnome uses the Cantarell font, KDE uses the aforementioned Noto font.
The f and t crossers being at different levels breaks my concentration when I'm reading code. I prefer comic mono and fantasque for this reason, but fira code is exceptionally well thought out
Can't speak to how common they are, but I do like the Nerd Fonts, and particularly MesloLGS NF 10pt for my monospaced font. Very handy for Zsh Powerline10k and neovim.
How do you like Atkinson Hyperlegible?? I've heard good things about it from visually impaired people, but I'm not clear on how much it helps with dyslexia.
Usually I just use whatever fonts are default on the DE I happen to be using at the time, right now that'd be GNOME so I believe its Cantarell? I don't generally customize my normal (non-monospace) fonts because I can never find one that looks good everywhere. I like Google's "Product Sans" font for example, but it is definitely not one you want to use everywhere. Yet oddly enough on my Pixel, I believe Product Sans is the default unless an app explicitly changes it, and it looks good everywhere there. Or maybe I've just never given changing the default enough time to adjust to it, who knows.
The monospace font that I use is Comic Code, it sounds silly I know (I was skeptical at first too) - but it looks really nice in both my terminal and IntelliJ. Something about the font renderer that is used by default (I can't think of the name for some reason, FreeType maybe?) makes it look really nice and sharp. On Windows, it looks too thin, and on macOS it looks too thick - Linux is truly the "golidlocks" for this font it seems.
I don't think it's that common, but if you're looking for good fonts, I really like IBM Plex Sans/Serif/Mono. Has good Unicode coverage as well and is "open source" (or whatever it's called for fonts).
I have a weird selection- Jetbrains Mono with Monocraft and the bold Minecraft font. Jetbrains Mono is for everything except discord. Monocraft with Minecraft Bold is for Discord which i have IRCified with a custom Vencord theme.
Lexend fonts, they increase reading speed, offer more precise size control, and have the extra perk of being more accessible for differently abled readers. I like to familiarize myself with "accessible" design, the more we get used to it as normal the better our world can get.
Lots of great fonts and families mentioned so far in this thread, but no-one has mentioned my current and long-time favourite for almost all environments and applications: Input.
Scratch that, you can theoretically download the fonts from Apple, it comes with OTF/TTF embedded within their .dmg. Not advocating for any breach of licensing terms.
My preference for a few years have been a combination if IBM Plex Sans for most stuff and Iosevka for monospace.
They both look amazing! Iosevka might look a bit weird when first seeing it but I can't really use anything else these days.
However, Fira Code is a really good monospace font as well.
Taking a quick glance at the font packages I have installed, I find the Liberation family, Freefont, the old MS core fonts, a couple of Bitstream Vera Sans variations (including Deja Vu), and the ancient URW fonts, plus a couple of CJK-specific fonts, since I need those characters just often enough for their absence to be noticed.
Freefont has decent coverage of what was in Unicode as of ten years ago, and so in combination with the CJK specialty fonts covers most common writing systems worldwide. I'm not particularly concerned about things like Anatolian hieroglyphs, a couple of hundred less-common emoji, or the Bitcoin symbol being missing.