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Fonts, Input, Bluetooth & Printing

This page covers the everyday peripheral and presentation surfaces of the InterGenOS desktop: system typography, keyboard and input handling, Bluetooth pairing, and printing. The desktop ships GNOME 49 on Wayland, so most of these surfaces are managed through GNOME Settings and the Wayland input stack.

Fonts

InterGenOS ships a deliberate, consistent typographic baseline:

  • Inter — a clean geometric sans-serif used across the UI, documents, and titlebars.
  • JetBrains Mono — a programming-ligature monospace used for the terminal, the text editor, and other code surfaces.

These pairings define the InterGenOS visual language rather than relying on whatever a toolkit happens to default to. The Adwaita widget theme is the GTK4 baseline and is customized through a GSettings override applied at user-session start, so typography stays consistent whether you are in a core GNOME app or a third-party GTK4 application installed through pkm.

A GNOME Font Viewer utility ships by default for inspecting font files.

Fonts are managed as ordinary pkm packages and install system-wide under /usr/share/fonts/, one directory per family (inter/, jetbrains-mono/, noto/, dejavu/, and the base X11 bitmap sets). The default install ships Inter for UI and document text, JetBrains Mono for the terminal and code, and the Noto families for broad Unicode and CJK coverage. To add more, install a font package with pkm, or drop personal font files into ~/.local/share/fonts/ for a single user and run fc-cache -f to refresh the cache.

Input

InterGenOS uses Wayland for input, with Xwayland providing a seamless translation layer for X11 applications that have not yet been ported.

Why Wayland matters for input

  • Per-window isolation: each application sees only its own input and pixel buffer. One application cannot key-log another or scrape another window’s pixels.
  • Modern input handling: HiDPI, variable refresh rate, mixed-DPI multi-monitor, and touch and gesture input work correctly because the protocol was designed for them.

Keyboard and pointer

GNOME 49 handles keyboard layouts, repeat rate, and pointer behavior through GNOME Settings. Touchpad and touchscreen gestures work out of the box:

  • Three-finger swipe to switch workspaces.
  • Pinch-to-zoom in compatible applications.
  • Touch scrolling on touchscreen hardware.

Common keyboard shortcuts include Super for the Activities overview, Super + Left/Super + Right to tile a window to the left or right half of the screen, Super + Up/Super + Down to maximize or restore it, and Ctrl + Alt + T for the terminal. The full shortcut reference lives on the Desktop Experience page.

Accessibility input

The Accessibility panel in GNOME Settings provides an on-screen keyboard, the Orca screen reader, a high-contrast theme, and large-text mode for users who need alternative input and output. These are enabled from the Accessibility panel.

Complex-script and CJK input

InterGenOS uses IBus as its input-method framework for CJK and other complex-script input. Fcitx is not shipped.

Bluetooth

Bluetooth is managed through the Bluetooth panel in GNOME Settings, which is part of the default desktop install. From there you can power the adapter on or off, make the machine discoverable, and pair devices such as headsets, keyboards, mice, and controllers.

Under the hood, Bluetooth is provided by the BlueZ stack, with bluetooth.service enabled by default. The bluetoothctl command-line tool is available for users who prefer to manage adapters and pairings from a terminal.

Pairing is an explicit, user-initiated action. No background pairing service or telemetry runs outside this surface, consistent with the InterGenOS goal of a machine you understand, can modify, and can trust.

Printing

Printing on InterGenOS is provided by CUPS. The service is socket-activated: cups.socket is enabled by default and cups.service starts on demand the first time a print queue is contacted, so the print daemon does not run continuously when it is not needed.

Printer configuration on GNOME is normally reached through the Printers panel in Settings. From the command line, CUPS is administered with the standard tools — lpadmin to add and configure printers and lpstat to inspect queues and status.

If a particular printer driver or additional printing component is not present out of the box, search the available packages with pkm. See The Transparent Package Manager for how to search for and install software.