Some of you may know that I give my fonts.conf a lot of love (most free operating systems still ship with terrible defaults). Since recent version of fontconfig started loudly complaining about not longer supporting certain syntax (multiple values in <test> and <alias>) I had to rework some parts.
While I was at it I decided to put Droid fonts at the top of my <prefer> lists. For a long time I was using Liberation family (followed by long list of fallback fonts for various rarer symbols and non-Latin scripts carefully chosen to look acceptable and visually match in mixed texts), but I decided to give Droid a go as default.
I noticed Droid family about a year ago, mostly because of distinctive Kufic-like glyphs of Droid Sans Arabic which are perfectly legible at small sizes (though, normally you would use Nashk script — Droid has that too and it’s also above average). As a family Droid has very good coverage of fonts for various scripts with visually matching designs, both serif and sans-serif that are not ugly and render legibly at low resolutions. Which is unexpected, because it was designed for smartphones and those usually have more than 100 dpi of my desktop’s monitor.
So, it’s now default for Latin, Cyrillic, and a bunch of other scripts. I still strongly prefer IPA fonts for Japanese, Nanum for Hangul, pixel-perfect Terminus for terminals, &c. It’s only default in graphical interfaces, but I like the results so far.