Well, change is usually brought about to improve something – and if it doesn’t improve it, then it is best to leave well enough alone lol. I have always thought the original Ubuntu font was/is very modern. Of course, fonts are one of these very subjective issues that should require considerable testing and feedback – which is what we are doing here 
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I also agree thicker fonts are easier to read, but that’s a losing argument against change… The new font looks more modern and you can always change your own fonts in the Tweaks app.
Legibility and readability should NOT depend on fads.
I feel like Canonical wanted a display font (hence the reduction in default weight), but this doesn’t work for small copy and UI. This is why Segoe UI Variable has both Text and Display cuts.
I came here to find out what happened to the font. Personally, I much prefer the thicker font over this newer, thinner version. It’s not that the newer font looks bad or anything, it’s simply not as legible as the thicker, bolder edition we have received in past releases. On the plus side, I like the larger size of the terminal font. That was a good change.
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I really like zero config, defaults and all, but I don’t like the Ubuntu mono font, and I’m surprised so many people use it, instead of their own favourite mono font for terminals… /me is using fonts-agave btw. And if you look for some more, there’s some great mono fonts! And for terminals, did you try cool-retro-term yet (also comes with some fonts)?
Unfortunately, someone who drank the same Kool-Aid than Dave Crossland did when commissioning this atrocious default weight distribution on the very popular Montserrat font is risking making the same mistake with the Ubuntu fonts. I mean, they look absolutely stunning when used in the web, with the big font sizes provided by the Vanilla Framework. But slimmer regular fonts don’t cut it the same way when you use it in user interfaces, where sizes are smaller. Just compare Launchpad.net, before and after:
Both screenshots are from the same webpage, 100%, no zooming or trickery. I think you will appreciate that the second one is objectively harder to read and could cause you to squint. (And it is only the Regular weight that is now too thin; the new Bold renders excellently and it does look more refined than before. The new proportions of the Monospaced family are a life-changing improvement too!)
Yes, one can make the new Regular similar to the old static font’s by finessing the weight to, say, 450; it’s one of the benefits of the variable-font format, right? But it does require fiddling on the users’ part, just because somebody imposed a bad default on them. Besides, UI frameworks like GTK are. just. not. that. flexible, and the Tweaks app just won’t respect my choice of weight 500 and will still render the font in the now-thinner 400 across all GNOME applications.
So, my suggestion to the Canonical stakeholders who I trust will listen to this community member is: provide a “Display” family optimized for websites, logos, brochures, printed material and all those other touchpoints requiring big font sizes, and a “Text” family optimized for on-screen UI, similar to the one we’ve had since 2010 (this is what both Apple and Microsoft do with Segoe and SF, respectively). Back then you innovated typography for on-screen reading, at a time where other Linux vendors scoffed at design, seeing it as a waste of money; don’t forget the lessons you’ve learned about font rendering, hinting, gridfitting! (And before someone suggests to me: “Hey Adolfo, don’t whine, font hinting is dead; just get a HiDPI screen!”: No, my old laptop still works and they’re too expensive in the Global South and I’d rather repair it than contribute to a wasteful, polluting industry due to simplistic consumeristic arguments.)
Of course, by pointing this issue out I don’t mean to invalidate the ginormous work that Type Network did in modernizing the source code of this font family, and the bug fixes they have provided (such as adding anchors for diacritics, something so basic and yet Dalton Maag refused to provide — I can finally type a Guarani “G̃” in Ubuntu!!) and I know they had to do a bit of archaeology, looking for old bug reports and recovering fixes that never got released. Do know that I appreciate that! But I still strongly feel that this newly emaciated font won’t perform as good unless a slight weight adjustment is done, towards the thicker side (hinting can only do as much — unfortunately, an adjustment in the outlines is needed here).
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That is a fair point. In fact, I like both styles. Let the Ubuntu font modernize if that is the way things should go. I can always revert to the older style if I choose to. The new one may grow on me anyway, as many Ubuntu changes have.
Edit: In fact, my initial judgment may have simply been a negative gut reaction from having the font I’ve been using for years be altered. While the older style was quite nice, I think I could adjust to the newer style over time. It does look pleasant, and it seems to fit the Yaru “open and airy” light theme well. The only criticism I would give is to consider “i”'s and “j”'s. The spacing between the dot and the rest of the character may be too small. It almost blends together at a glance.
A good example is if you open up nautilus/Files and look at the sidebar where you see Videos. On my 1440p 27" screen, it almost looks like Vldeos if I’m not looking directly at it. That may just be my interpretation though and I’d like to hear the experience of others.
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Neofetch fan here, after upgrading to Lunar I’m seeing some distortion in both old and new logos with the new fonts. I’m using small font sizes (8).
Ubuntu Mono Regular 12 (v0.83) vs Ubuntu Mono ‘NEW’ Regular 11 (v0.863)
Note: the new variant is thinner. See the GIF image below.
The old v0.83 didn’t have a Medium font weight. The new v0.863 does. So the designers had to make a regular weight thinner.
I prefer the old regular variant (v0.83), because the lines are bolder. The new regular variant (v0.863) looks like ‘Ubuntu Mono Thin’ to me.
(I had to create a second post, because new users are forbidden to embed more than one image.)
Ubuntu Mono Regular 12 (v0.83) vs Ubuntu Mono ‘NEW’ Medium 11 (v0.863)
Note: the new Medium variant is bolder than the old Regular variant. See the GIF image below.
The new Medium variant (v0.863) is too bold for my tastes. It won’t be able to ‘replace’ the old Regular variant.
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Thanks for the comment, as a fellow neofetch enjoyer this is something we def need to fix for release 
Random semi-related thought about the new fonts being “thinner”: helping https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/merge_requests/3059 along would make fonts render a bit thicker due to how correct text rendering works.
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The center of “8” is too thin imo.
2560 x 1440 monitor, not scaled.
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I feel the new 869 version (Mantic) more neat?
Or is it just psy?
Where is the changelog?
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I confuse гора and ropa quite often. It’s so embarrassing to walk into a store and try to buy a mountain – or worse, go to a mountain and try to buy some clothes.
Seriously though, I’m often annoyed by the similarity of г and r and р and p. We’ve got more pixels, let’s use them to disambiguate what we’re reading.
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They can be used to trick users into using fake addresses and stuff like that.
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The new Ubuntu font may have problem when handling Chinese punctuation, such as enumeration comma(、) and full stop(。). I have report a bug on launchpad.
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Hi, my sign up and first post here for this Ubuntu font “update”.
Is there still any chance for this new Ubuntu font with different weight then the past get its own font name and leave the classic Ubuntu font alone? Imagine all the documents and artwork files in the past that refer to the Ubuntu font, get changed by this “update” unexpectedly.
The old font is available as fonts-ubuntu-classic since 23.10: https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/fonts-ubuntu-classic.
fonts-ubuntu-classic is NOT a proper solution. It is a local downgrade of the font package to the old version. Files created in the past / in unupgraded 22.04 LTS computers / in new computers installed with this “classic” package will look wrong in new computers without this package installed. Similarly the same bug is going to occur for people who create files in new computer then send to people running an older OS or with the “classic” package.
We don’t have font version requirement embedded in .odt, nor in .xcf, nor in any other rich text / art file formats. We don’t have font version requirement declaration available in HTML/CSS either. Font versions are supposed to be visually compatible to human eyes.