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A comment on Dell’s gamble on Linux laptops has paid off. Parent comment

Re:Dell’s gamble on Linux laptops has paid off by microcolonel on Friday November 17, 2017 @05:52PM (#15726653)
> patents and them being based in the US

If I'm not mistaken, those patents are dead now. Even Fedora has the freeworld stuff now.

> Another issue are fonts themselves. If you have a document that uses Arial or Cambria or another proprietary font, and you don't have it installed, you are going to get something substituted, which may or may be not metrics-compatible. Do not expect pixel-identical results then.

Yeah, though the Chrome OS core fonts are good metric-compatible substitutes for Arial and friends (though lacking the stylistic variety of the core Windows fonts).

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Re:Dell’s gamble on Linux laptops has paid off by vetinari on Sunday November 19, 2017 @01:41PM (#15735176)
The bytecode interpreter patents are dead now.

Not the subpixel rendering ones ("cleartype"). In Fedora, FT_CONFIG_OPTION_SUBPIXEL_RENDERING is still disabled.

Google also released metric compatible substitutes for Cambria (Caladea) and Calibri (Carlito), but Linux distributions do not install them by default.

Edit: I'm wrong. In F27, the subpixel rendering is enabled.

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