Enable Windows 11 Emojis on Linux

22 December 2021 - 1 min read

Microsoft recently announced a huge upgrade to the existing emoji with Windows 11. You can read the official announcement of the emojis by the Microsoft Design team. I was totally in love with that 3D emojis. But later, they replaced it with a flat version of the emoji, which still looked great.

So I thought of replacing my current Noto Emoji Font in Linux with the new windows 11 emoji font. And I successfully replaced it. In this article, I will show you how exactly I did it.

Follow these steps

First download Segoe UI Emoji font
Copy that font and paste it in ~/.fonts directory
If you have previously installed Noto Emoji Font, uninstall it by running sudo apt remove fonts-noto-color-emoji
Go to ~/.config folder and create a new folder and name it fontconfig
Then create another folder inside that and name it conf.d
Open the folder Right click > New> Empty file and name it 01-emoji.conf

Open the file in Code and paste this

 <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
 <!DOCTYPE fontconfig SYSTEM "fonts.dtd">
 <fontconfig>
 <alias>
     <family>serif</family>
     <prefer>
         <family>Segoe UI Emoji</family>
     </prefer>
 </alias>
 <alias>
     <family>sans-serif</family>
     <prefer>
         <family>Segoe UI Emoji</family>
     </prefer>
 </alias>
 <alias>
     <family>monospace</family>
     <prefer>
         <family>Segoe UI Emoji</family>
     </prefer>
 </alias>
 </fontconfig>

To clear font cache run fc-cache -f -v
Restart the programs

I hope it’s working for you. If it isn’t, you can DM me on Twitter or mail me by clicking the feedback link at the bottom of this page.

I have been using it for a week. It’s looking great, and I haven’t found any missing emojis or other issues. If you need to go back to the default emojis, follow these steps.