Using Apple fonts in Linux

It’s without a doubt that Apple has a great eye for aesthetics. When you migrate from the Apple ecosystem to another platform, the first thing you notice is the font. Windows and Linux fonts are beautiful in their own ways, but if you are as picky as I am about certain fonts in your browser and shell, there is a way to handle this on Linux.

For the file manager, terminal, and editor, it’s not hard to change the font. If you are using GNOME or MATE, gnome-tweaks is a great application for choosing specific fonts for the interface and documents. I recommend downloading your favorite fonts to the ~/.fonts folder and running fc-cache -fv to let the system know about the new fonts. GNOME Tweaks is a fantastic tool for that. My go-to option, which is close to the ‘Helvetica’ font, is ‘Inter var’.

The most important thing is the browser. Even though you change the interface and document fonts, it doesn’t affect the browser’s default font. Without a tool, it’s a bit harder to make that work. However, you can still do it by creating an alias file in ~/.config/fontconfig/conf.d/some-alias.conf. The easiest way is to use a tool called Font-Manager. Install it with sudo apt install font-manager. Once installed, create three ‘Substitutions’ in ‘Settings’:

system-ui - ‘prefer’ -> ‘Inter’ BlinkMacSystemFont - ‘prefer’ -> ‘BlinkMacSystemFont’ (if you have Apple fonts) system-ui - ‘prefer’ -> your font preference

This will automatically write an alias file in the fontconfig folder. You might need to restart your browser and shell for the changes to take effect.