Question

Requests to font-helper on linux stopped working

Forum|Forum|2 years ago
January 11, 2024
30 replies
9828 views

I’m running Figma on linux in the browser with figma-linux-font-helper to enable usage of local fonts — this helper is basically a drop-in replacement for the official Figma font helper with the difference that it also works on linux.

Well, it did until today, when I noticed that my local fonts are not available anymore. When Investigating the issue I found that requests to localhost or 127.0.0.1 (with the purpose of communicating with the font helper) were no longer showing up in the network panel of the browser dev tools. Two days ago, everything was working fine and I didn’t change anything on my system since then. I asked around and for other people it’s basically the same story.

After further experiments I discovered that Figma still send the requests, when I overwrite my User agent to:
Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_14_6) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/120.0.0.0 Safari/537.36

My suspicion now is that the app is sniffing the user agent and is not sending the requests to localhost, when it detects that it’s running on linux.

I can’t think of a good explaination how this could be a bug and I’m afraid this is intentional. If that’s the case: WTF?

This topic has been closed for replies.

Show previous replies

rasteli

You really tried to run away from the real problem, didn’t you? It’s bad enough not to have an official Figma desktop app, but I can see why this decision has not yet been made. But I can’t see how preventing linux users to use tools they had to build by themselves because Figma wouldn’t is anything but pure evil.

Lorem-Possum

Active Member

Yeah, it’s stupid strange, but it works only via Firefox useragent

Eirini

Can we expect an official font installer from Figma anytime soon? It’s sad because I really don’t want to be using windows but I’m stuck with them just for this. I can’t rely on third-party solutions as I can’t risk waking up one day and not being able to work.

Can’t imagine that maintaining a font installer for linux is too complicated for the Figma team and it would be beneficial for so many of your users.

P

Paul_Kwiatkowski

I agree that third-party tools are not ideal.
I would not use them if Figma support loading fonts that I have correctly installed on my machine.
Please release a first-party solution to this.

Muthu_Kumar

I understand if implementing an official solution is not a priority, but going out of their way to cripple third-party solutions is just pretty sad.

Harsh_Arora

What are you guys doing now for getting local fonts in web app?

jekab s

New Member

I have no fonts at all. Linux app “Text” functionality doesnt work.😑

Umar Khan

New Member

Thanks for sharing your findings! It’s frustrating when things break unexpectedly like this. The user agent workaround is clever, but I hope Figma reconsiders if this is intentional—Linux users deserve better support!

bearislive

New Member

Sharing what worked for me. There are a few of different linux agents and here is the only one setup that works for me:

Download chrome
Install GitHub - neetly/figma-agent-linux: Figma Agent for Linux (a.k.a. Font Helper)
Reboot
Open the terminal and paste:

USER_AGENT="Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/120.0.0.0 Safari/537.3"
google-chrome-stable --user-agent="${USER_AGENT}" https://www.figma.com/files/recent

I can confirm that these steps work well on Ubuntu 24.04.

Sujal Gurung

New Member

Brave or Firefox won’t load fonts.

I can say that both Brave & Firefox work. Use the custom-useragent-string to set the user agent only for https://www.figma.com/.

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