(I'm a Fedora user, so some of this may not apply to other distros.)
(This applies desktop-wide, but I cannot find an appropriate product/component for that)

The organisation and display of fonts on the desktop is functional, but not nice, not good.  Beyond the fact that the default application to open a .otf file is Archive Manager and not gnome-font-viewer, or the fact that opening fonts doesn't give you an option to install them in some fashion that you could use them.  (I know to put them into ~/.fonts/ but why would a less technical user?)  

Fonts often have weird, technical names that don't provide much useful context to a user.  msam10? AR PL UKai CN?  This depends on what fonts a distribution packages, but is there any mechanism for them to overlay the names with something nicer and more descriptive?

Distros also, in an effort to support many locales, package and ship many fonts for many different locales.  Usually, 1 or 2 or 3 locales is all a user needs.  However, the font selection dialogue in applications like gnome-appearance-properties and gedit, etc., lists them all anyway.  There's seemingly no mechanism available to group or limit fonts by intended locale.  I know that many fonts for one locale may support other alphabets to some degree, but at least with the ascii characters, those are many times not relevant to those whose alphabets appear in the initial ascii set.  It would be nice to, like with the keyboard, be able to cluster locales.  

You can also only discover what a font looks like by selecting it first.  Opening a dialogue listing hundreds of fonts (90% to support locales not relevant to a given user) that loaded each font to preview would be prohibitive, but how about generating and caching small preview images of each font so you could see a small hint of what it will be like from the list before having to select? 



I suppose right now, Fedora (and presumably others) ship(s) a bunch of fonts to cover many locales, and don't have much ability right now to manage their organisation.  

GNOME's facilities for font organisation are functional: they list a bunch of fonts, some of their properties (variants, size), and can preview a single font a time.  

However, these are not nice, beautiful, or wonderful.  Fonts can provide a rich and wonderful experience for users, if they are discoverable and manageable.  This bug is an enhancement request for the future of font support in GNOME applications, with ideas being
* allow grouping of fonts by locale or by group
* allow descriptions separate from their names (I can't even tell what locale some are supposed to support)
* display previews in the list for each font, letting users see what's there without having to go through all of them
* provide a method for users to actually install fonts without needing to know aobut a secret ~/.fonts/ folder
* perhaps separate user-installed fonts from system fonts in the list.  At least, it would be nice to be able to arrange fonts by some priority (the ones I like most at the top). 

Cheers, 
  A font user