Ubuntu 11.10 Font Sizes

I love Ubuntu. All of my personal machines run it, and I rarely use anything else except at work. However, some decisions in the most recent release, 11.10, remove some basic configurability options that annoy me.

One of these is the ability to change the system font sizes. I don't want my windows to have giant size 16 titles--it's a waste of space, and while big fonts are all the rage, I don't want them wasting my valuable desktop real estate. However, there is no way to change this out of the box--an annoying oversight in my book.

Luckily it's easy to fix with an additional configuration tool:

sudo apt-get install gnome-tweak-tool

After this, it's a simple matter of opening this tool (it will show up under "Advanced Settings" in your menu) and changing the requisite options under "Fonts."

I don't think a user should have to download software to do something so basic, but there it is.