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Comment by jwells89 | Hacker News Reader

I believe the issue with this is that the font that the browser picks with “sans serif” can vary wildly depending on the user’s system, with totally different metrics, weights, etc, meaning that the page might look anywhere between passable and broken. The most egregious case of this is probably on some of the more “libre” type Linux distributions that default to that one oddly wide sans serif that I can’t remember the name of.

The idea of user configurability is nice but most users have no idea how to do that or that it’s even possible, and browsers bury these settings increasingly more deeply which doesn’t help matters either.

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The other side of that coin is that Nimbus (if it's installed) will happily insert itself as an alternative to Arial and/or Helvetica (cannot remember), even though it's a trash typeface with a broken baseline.

I think just going with sans-serif is the better choice.

It’d be nice if something like Inter[0], which is specifically designed for onscreen/UI usage, were bundled with each OS and could be assumed to be present, making it unnecessary to include Arial or Helvetica in one’s stack.

[0]: https://rsms.me/inter/

This makes more sense why Tailwind chose Inter as their default font (for at least a long time). I've noticed tons of sites now use Inter as a result of using Tailwind and derivatives. I think Laravel did some level of popularization of this too

> The idea of user configurability is nice but most users have no idea how to do that or that it’s even possible

No need to baby users. In the context of Hacker News, a lot of the websites built here are demo sites/documentation where the audience is definitely technical enough to not need this.

In the case of libre, Free Sans is a clone of Helvetica (as is Nimbus) & they are usable if a user decides to set them as their preferred font (or a fallback in fontconfig).

Then put the desired typeface at the beginning of the stack, and the generic (sans-serif) at the end.

I've never had a designer ask for 17 fallback options before selecting a generic (like this font stack).

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