On Fri, Feb 25, 2011 at 17:30, Jonathan Corbet <corbet-ft@lwn.net> wrote:
I don't want them bigger.  They just *got* bigger through the occasional
(seemingly) mandatory forgetting of all my previous settings, to the point
that they take more screen space than I want.  I want the fonts smaller.
How do I do that?

I did a little research and it seems that the change from 10pt to 11pt default happened here:
http://git.gnome.org/browse/gsettings-desktop-schemas/commit/?id=1124b365d24e85d409a38cd6bc3ae98a3b01bb12
which seems rather anecdotal so perhaps it could be revisited especially if it breaks netbook compatibility or something like that.

You may also be hit by this not having yet been pushed out to you:
https://admin.fedoraproject.org/updates/abattis-cantarell-fonts-0.0.1-4.fc15
which significantly improves the font rendering in F15.

What we're trying to do is come up with sane defaults for plenty of good user interface reasons. I mean, if we give someone a Linux laptop and the first thing we tell them to do is go change a bunch of settings to make it usable, then we have failed to produce an OS which is worth giving to anyone but enthusiasts (have you changed the default fonts on your Nexus One, by the way?).

Anyway, if you can provide some screen shots that show that the new default is not sane, that would be helpful.
 
Seriously, can it be that a classic font selection dialog, like what we've
had since, well, forever, is too much for GNOME 3?  I feel like I'm
missing something.  We have different monitors, different needs, different
preferences; a single font selection will never work for everybody.
Please tell me this is coming back?

Since you're clearly a bit of a more advanced user, you may be interested in changing the dconf key that I referenced in the first link though `gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface font-name 'Cantarell 10'` and in the future, when dconf-editor stops crashing continuously, you could do the same though a GUI tool.

There's also discussion of creating a "power-users settings tool" for users who are disgruntled by some common defaults but, obviously our limited resources being what they are, we haven't even started any such project at this point--all our energy is focused on giving good experience out-of-the-box and, as you have seen, we still have a lot of bugs to squash before April.