The system font stacks might look good on Apple and Google devices, with San Francisco and Roboto being great fonts.
But Gnome's Cantarell for Linux and Segoe on Windows are both very ugly. Dalton Maags Ubuntu font OTOH is quite nice, kinda surprised it's not in the native stack..
The difference in experience between platforms is so great with the native stack that it indicates carelessness for users of platforms that aren't Apple or Google based.
The first thing I'd do in an untouched Gnome or in Windows is replace those fonts, and I'm surely not the only one. "Bahnschrift" is actually a nice replacement for Segoe on Windows, from MS.
By utilizing the system font, you’re using a font that the user already spends time staring at for a significant portion of the time they spend interacting with that device. Presumably if they found that font ugly they’d change it, and in doing so your website would change as well.
>Presumably if they found that font ugly they’d change it, and in doing so your website would change as well.
Not everybody with a sense for style is techy enough to change it, or even in a position to do so. E.g. people who are stuck with Windows for work and aren't allowed to mess with the system.
If you use JS and design sites you could check out Typography.js, you can include webfonts through NPM. Performance is better than fetching them from a CDN.
But Gnome's Cantarell for Linux and Segoe on Windows are both very ugly. Dalton Maags Ubuntu font OTOH is quite nice, kinda surprised it's not in the native stack..
The difference in experience between platforms is so great with the native stack that it indicates carelessness for users of platforms that aren't Apple or Google based.
The first thing I'd do in an untouched Gnome or in Windows is replace those fonts, and I'm surely not the only one. "Bahnschrift" is actually a nice replacement for Segoe on Windows, from MS.