NixOS Font Rendering Configuration

How can I configure font rendering in NixOS? I installed NixOS with Gnome3/Xorg to a new box and the default font settings look blurry. I tried:

  • Changing the settings in the Gnome Tweak tool
  • Changing fonts.fontconfig.* settings

None of these has any visible effect, it keeps looking exactly the same, even after rebooting, even when trying a really bad config just to see if it has ANY effect.

The same happens when I tried using Cinnamon Desktop instead of Gnome3, all the settings (graphical or in the config) do absolutely nothing.

There seems to be very little information in the wiki or elsewhere on how do to this. Since font settings are likely a fairly common thing that affects nearly everyone using NixOS interactively, it seems strange that this does not work in NixOS at all.

It has been a while since I checked if it workes in Gnome, but my config is at gist:5d1ef7bcfa9eb17d055a2636ddfe3cb6 · GitHub

Do you see additionally installed fonts in Gnome Apps? I think I remember that when I had issues with fontconfig options not being picked up, fonts were also not working.

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