UTF-8 Character Conflicts

After installing Font Awesome 5 I’ve noticed that there are a lot of symbols that Font Awesome uses that are being overridden by some other font pack. I’m able to use UTF-8 characters as certain ones will show up, but for example the code for house-user instead of showing up as the given icon will just show up as a little dash. Same happens with several other symbols that Font Awesome uses.

Sound to me, like you are not using the newly installed font where you see this behaviour.

I don’t understand how I’m not using it even when other symbols from said font are properly displaying. For them to display I would have to be using said font, otherwise they would just be the weird squares.

Either you use a font and all characters are rendered according to this font or not.
There is no “font mixing” (some characters from one font, some other characters from another).
You need to set “Font Awesome” at the active/used font for the place where you want to see it’s characters (symbols).