As I wrote in Pings & Packets recently, finding attractive screen fonts for Linux can be a challenge, but thats not the final font challenge facing the desktop Linux user—it can be just as tough to get applications to recognize and use the fonts youve installed.
Enter Fontconfig 2.0, by Keith Packard, which automatically discovers newly installed fonts and works with X Render Extension and FreeType to deliver nice anti-aliased display text. Gtk+ and QT, the tool kits on which GNOME and KDE are built, must be patched to use Fontconfig, but native Fontconfig support is on the way.
I installed Fontconfig, along with a build of Mozilla compiled to work with it. The browser found my favored fonts, which were displayed attractively anti-aliased. You can download Fontconfig and the proper Mozilla build at fontconfig.org.