JavaFX can still be installed in a JRE, so that the application does not need to bundle it. This is fine for internal distributions, or distributing to people willing to put up with the minor headaches of maintaining the JRE separate from the app.

But, consider, for example, NetBeans does not come with its own JRE. It's not a great leap, since it's a first most Java IDE, but if you wanted to use NetBeans for PHP, you'd still need to install a JDK separately just to run NetBeans. NetBeans doesn't use JavaFX, the point simply being that there are still large Java apps out there that require you to separately download the JRE/JDK. How much this is a hinderance to their adoption, I can't say.

The direction is towards all in one JRE/FX/App bundles, but that doesn't mean it's the only way.

If you can just deploy the app jar file, the apps can be quite tiny.

In the middle ground, https://jdeploy.com manages this. They host applications, but as I understand it you can deploy the infrastructure yourself and host it yourself.

You download the app, and their infrastructure will download the appropriate JRE (including JavaFX), and share it among all those apps that do, indeed, share it.

It has "up to date" systems for updating your app. When you download the app, you get an installer that does all the work.

This is great if you have a bunch of small apps you wish to distribute, as they're basically just the jar files. The first install is a kick, of course, and as you move through the JVM versions, they'll all incur an additional hit.

But if you distribute a dozen apps all on JDK 17, then the overall download should be quite small as the JRE is only downloaded once.

I have yet to use it, but it demos nice.

As for Fonts, they seem OK to me. I use macOS, but I've also looked at them casually on a Linux VM. However, there is one sticky bit with the fonts.

At least on macOS, the default font is terrible simply because, of all things, it doesn't support the different font faces. You can't do BOLD with the stock font. It's quite the nut until you figure that out.

So, I ended up embedding a font in my app. And it all worked. It rendered fine on my Mac, and the Linux VM, and it printed to the printer well as well.

I chose Source Sans Pro, which is one of the available Google fonts.

It's annoying that I had to go down that rabbit hole, but it is what it is.

There's some ramp up time with FX to be sure, but the combination of FX with the SceneBuilder to do layout works.

This is a recent screen shot of my app, I'm no UI guy (I majored in "Programmer Art" in college...), but it looks OK to me.

https://capture.dropbox.com/AuXy4deWZTAHGHk7

This is the default theme, there are others. The CSS part of FX is really nice.

I hold FX in high regard. I've certainly had my share of head flattening desk denting events with it, but it's nice, it works.