The problem with Standalone is that the full range of fonts found with Texlive is not available. Standalone has 258 otf fonts and TexLive has 508 otf fonts. So I am opting for TeXLive, although I have both.
I use standalone in parallel with texlive (which I need for latex). In the Arch PKGBUILD that I maintain, I use: # If texlive exists, use fonts from texlive if [ -d $_texlivefontdir ] then mkdir -p $srcdir/tex/texmf-fonts if [ -L $srcdir/tex/texmf-fonts/fonts ] then rm $srcdir/tex/texmf-fonts/fonts fi ln -s $_texlivefontdir $srcdir/tex/texmf-fonts/fonts fi So, if TL is installed, the TL font directory is symlinked at an appropriate location and all the TL fonts are available with ConTeXt standalone as well.
Another dfficulty is that many of the examples for simplefonts are apparently developed on a Windows system and I use Linux. Font names are different.
I haven't had any trouble with using simplefonts in Linux (but then, I rarely consult the wiki for usage examples). Could you point to specific examples. Aditya