I have too many fonts installed on my laptop

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Guys, I just installed Manjaro Minimal and noticed that I have too many fonts installed on my Laptop (many I don’t even need, and there are still many different languages I don’t speak like Arabic, Armenian, etc.), totaling 228 fonts.
Here is a screenshot showing them
´´https://imgur.com/gallery/rPTUlbD´´

I am afraid to delete some important typographic font and leave some texts in blocks / square or something else. So
How should I reduce some unnecessary fonts correctly?

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Most fonts are not very large.
The noto and noto-cjk family is very comprehensive and complete ~ 460 MB and ~ 300 MB respectively.
These are packages - only available as “all or nothing”.

Find and use different fonts - perhaps you can save a bit of space that way.
The look will be different, of course.
And you may end up with “blocks/squares” anyway, in some places.

Try it - if saving 300 MB is worth the time and effort to you. :wink:

…
you can delete individual fonts from /usr/share/fonts
but this will be undone with the next update …

this, in turn, could be prevented
by adding the noto fonts packages to the pacman update ignore list
but it could have consequences later on …

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Thanks for the tip, i try this.

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  1. it’s not an issue… It’s about telling “there are some grey sand grains on my yellow beach”…

  2. If it’s a capital issue to you, you can manage fonts with… font-manager
    GitHub - FontManager/font-manager

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I “love” how these guys say your problem isn’t a problem. It is a problem if you don’t want all those fonts you’ll never use on your system. Because it’s a requirement for KDE you’ll have to keep them, but it can be dealt with fairly easily. Not sure why this link isn’t on the Manjaro forum, but this process works well.

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… both of these guys provided direction to possible solutions
and at least the first one didn’t say it wasn’t a problem :wink:

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@Nachlese you also provided an explanation why it wasn’t a problem in your opinion in addition to providing an answer to the actual question, which is of course a valid response.

One thing that struck me in your response, is that as computer users we have become so jaded to consider 300-460 MB as no longer a large memory consumption. Considering current disk space availability, it is indeed not a lot, but looking at this from an almost 30 years experience with computers, that quantity of disk space is impressive for something as little used as a specific font family.

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OK, that’s fair. Any permanent solution requires “hiding” the fonts you don’t want to see, and there are multiple ways to do that.

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yes
If the sheer number of fonts (to choose from) is the “problem”, then hiding them is a solution.
If the amount of memory these occupy is the problem … it’s not.
I don’t exactly know what the OP’s priority is.

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On my system, stuff like, Firefox, Plasma, Thunderbird and Qt5 WebEngine requires noto-fonts, so replacing it might not be easy.

Well, actually only Plasma requires noto-fonts, the rest just needs something that provides ttf-fonts.

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I know.
I was just (trying to be) pragmatic.
Weeding out unneeded/unwanted fonts from a package that provides all of them is work.
Maintaining the result is even more work.
… and it can backfire later on

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I wasn’t disagreeing with your statement as such, I love a good pragmatic solution.

You very nicely showed something, i actually hadn’t thought about before. That single font family would have filled 2/3 of a CD-ROM, and exceeded exceed the hard disk space on my first 6 personal computers, and just filled the 7th. I was entirely including myself in those users not even thinking about the disk space needs any longer.

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A little more than 450M on my Xfce

[sum@ordi ~]$ du -sh /usr/share/fonts ~/.fonts
727M	/usr/share/fonts
2,7M	/home/sum/.fonts
[sum@ordi ~]$

It’s certainly more than what could stand my ZX81 with it’s (expensive) 4K RAM extension.
Time passes, stuff evolves.

If one really is an ascetic spartan, he can survive on ~/.fonts (assuming there is at least one font in the directory ^^ )
I just checked it on another computer with only “hack font” in my user directory, it’s ugly but one can use the system, Firefox, LibreOffice, terminal, windows manager, desktop… (to achieve this, rename /usr/share/fonts, for instance as /usr/share/fonts.old and have a user fonts directory)

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