I'll do you one further and say it's beyond stupid, and the nail in the coffin for me personally.

I've long been of the opinion that package managers and their attached "installers" (.desktop files placed in specific directories pointing at binaries, images, &c. placed in specific directories) are a stupid way to distribute end-user applications, but begrudgingly accept them as a necessary if suboptimal compromise for the nebulous concept that is "Linux" as a desktop operating system. It's dumb, but at least it has a good reason to be dumb. And at least it (usually) works as expected.

Flatpak does not pass the smell test.

This is a product being developed and pushed by a billion-dollar company, and it comes with *this* little regard for user experience after *how* many years?

This whole shebang is Microsoft levels of apathetically bad.

It's pulling the config from the Gnome or Freedesktop flatpaks.

It's stupid and the flatpak devs have been sitting on the issue for quite a long while now. I don't know why couldn't they just pull in your distro's config.

There's no more elegant solution. Send your complaints to the flatpak devs.

This actually seems to work!

I just tried it with the Lollypop flatpak, and it is now showing all content with the same font as the rest of the system.

I had to create the `fontconfig` and `conf.d` folders, as they were not already present. So I guess that even if those files aren't present by default, the sandbox knows to look there? But if that's the case, where is it pulling its own config from by default?

Is there a more elegant solution? I don't want to (and, frankly, shouldn't have to, and just won't) remember to copy these files into the directory structure of every single flatpak app I install, nor, presumably, to update them all if I ever make any changes to my system fonts or that folder.

As a side note, I like the reverse domain name identifiers for apps. macOS, iOS, and Android all do this, and it is an elegant way to avoid namespace clashes. I think it's long past time the Linuces instituted and implemented this system-wide.

This is due to the Flatpak world having their own fontconfig configuration shipped, which would be different form your distro's (the config they have is based on Fedora's).

Despite Flatpak being a supposedly cross-distro solution, in the font configuration front it's basically Fedora-lite and ignores your own.

You can try and override this behaviour by copying all your `/etc/fonts/conf.d/*` files into `~/.var/app/stupid.reverse.domain/config/fontconfig/conf.d/`. I did this to almost all Flatpak apps since the default Flatpak config would render many CJK fonts with fugly embedded bitmaps. Oh and that atrocious Calibri embedded bitmap as well.

Which is how pretty much everything works in Linux. It’s not any better on Windows either, at least Linux you know to look in `/usr` for system-wide stuff and in XDG spec folders for user stuff

>(Tangential, but why are there so many font folders in Linux OSes, and why are they all hidden? What is the source of the font taboo in the GNU world?)

AFAIK there are only three: /usr/share/fonts for system-wide package-installed fonts, /usr/share/local/fonts for system-wide manually installed ones, and \~/.local/fonts for user-specific ones. Only the last one of those is hidden. You might also encounter \~/.fonts but it has long been deprecated.

The font “taboo” is because Unix never really took the UI terribly seriously, so there wasn’t a standard to build on when it became obvious that the old window managers simply weren’t going to cut it for any modern user interface.

We still see this today; anti-aliasing was mysterious magic on Linux until relatively recently. 

If you asked why, there were all sorts of excuses made, but ultimately it boils down to “it’s never been a high priority for anyone with the ability to do anything about it.”

Okay, so I installed an `.otf` of fz-imokenpi [from here](https://fontmeme.com/fonts/fz-imokenpi-font/) but I still can't reproduce this. Run these two commands:

    FC_DEBUG=4 pango-view -t 'flatpakはやっぱり嫌やね' | grep family: | tee ~/host.txt

And this one for Flatpak:

    flatpak run --env=FC_DEBUG=4 --command=pango-view com.valvesoftware.Steam -t 'flatpakはやっぱり嫌やね' | grep family: | tee ~/flatpak.txt

Replace `com.valvesoftware.Steam` by an app you have installed (if necessary).

Then post both `host.txt` and `flatpak.txt` (they're on your home folder) on Pastebin, so we can compare the results.

These are the results on my machine:

- Host: [Screenshot from `pango-view`](https://i.imgur.com/Qmd7GLR.png); [`fontconfig` debug output](https://pastebin.com/raw/FYKUhkDT)
- Flatpak: [Screenshot from `pango-view`](https://i.imgur.com/PJCfxh3.png); [`fontconfig` debug output](https://pastebin.com/raw/vvT6jERv)

Thank you, but the problem isn't that the app is unable to use user fonts, but rather that it is using them without being told to.

That's just where fonts are "installed" via the Fonts app in Pop!. It may or may not persist if user fonts are installed elsewhere.

(Tangential, but why are there so many font folders in Linux OSes, and why are they all hidden? What is the source of the font taboo in the GNU world?)

Install something like fz-imokenpi so it will really stand out.

It seems like it just uses the last font put there?

What's really weird is that while these international fonts have Roman characters in them, this issue only affects the non-roman parts of mixed sentences.

Also, this is not limited to multilingual content in an English-language system; it persists even if the primary language is set to Japanese, which bizarrely makes the situation into one wherein the primary language is the one that's wrong and the secondary characters are correct.

I don't have this issue, but then again I don't have any fonts on `~/.local/share/fonts`.

Can you share the exact font you're using so I can try to reproduce it locally?

> Have you created your own fonts.conf file somewhere? 

No.

> Or is your local font set as the default system font for a particular language?

No.

> It may be that Flatpaks don't see your local configuration for preferred fonts, and either goes for a system default; or they find no information and just uses your local user font in preference of the system-wide fonts (which they should in absence of any information at all).

Actually, it seems like rather the opposite of this is happening.

Have you created your own fonts.conf file somewhere? Or is your local font set as the default system font for a particular language? It may be that Flatpaks don't see your local configuration for preferred fonts, and either goes for a system default; or they find no information and just uses your local user font in preference of the system-wide fonts (which they should in absence of any information at all).

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Flatpaks not using system font for multilingual content