When comparing Liberation Mono vs Google Noto Sans Mono, the Slant community recommends Liberation Mono for most people. In the question“What are the best programming fonts?” Liberation Mono is ranked 17th while Google Noto Sans Mono is ranked 102nd. The most important reason people chose Liberation Mono is:
Liberation Mono works well with hinting on high-resolution displays.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Very readable
Liberation Mono works well with hinting on high-resolution displays.
Pro As of 2023: Second Best screen-modern drop-in replacement for MT Courier New
Metric-compatible with Monotype Courier New, dot 0 (zero), modern non-Kettler lowercase l (ell), 660+ glyphs, OFL-1.1 license
Pro Compact line height
Just like Courier New (the metrics of which this font emulates), its line height isn't too big, which results in more lines on the screen, compared to Consolas and several other more popular fonts.
Pro Has Bold typeface
Pro Excellent support for Unicode characters
Unicode uses 16 bits per character, meaning that it can represent more than 65,000 unique characters.
Cons
Con Difference between "0" and "O" isn't clear
It can be difficult to tell the difference between the number "0" and the letter "O". However, the Fedora Project has a slightly altered version of Liberation Mono that fixes this with a dotted zero.
Con Liberation fonts are ugly
Con Zero is difficult to identify
As it's not dotted or slashed, "0" is more difficult to distinguish.
Con Non-monospace ligature replacements for 'fl', 'fi', 'ffl', 'ffi'
By default, the substrings 'fl', 'fi', 'ffl', and 'ffi' are each crammed into one character width, making it not a truly monospace font. For example, the word 'flag' is rendered as three characters wide.
Con Letters capital 'i' and lowercase 'L' are too similar
The only difference is almost unnoticable.
Con Difficult to distinguish between a period and acomma as well as a colon and a semi-colon
Comma has very small tail, making it difficult to distinguish from a period (full stop). Same applies to colon and semi-colon.