I really wish font handling and rendering were a bit simpler to understand and troubleshoot in Linux.
Recently I had an annoying problem where some web pages weren't rendering the fonts correctly. It turned out the reason was a font config file for a Chinese bitmap font was causing firefox's font rendering to alter - both chromium and another browser were working as expected (according to the css rules). Tracking down the problem took several weeks and several dead ends and I only stumbled on the answer by accident anyway.