[kde] [Bug 432830] New: Programs freeze due to excessive number of fonts installed, even on the minimal install

[Dan Dascalescu]

https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=432830

            Bug ID: 432830
           Summary: Programs freeze due to excessive number of fonts
                    installed, even on the minimal install
           Product: kde
           Version: unspecified
          Platform: Kubuntu Packages
                OS: Linux
            Status: REPORTED
          Severity: normal
          Priority: NOR
         Component: general
          Assignee: unassigned-bugs at kde.org
          Reporter: ddascalescu+kde at gmail.com
  Target Milestone: ---

A fresh installation of Kubuntu 20.04, comes with an *astonishing* number of
fonts, even though I chose the "minimal" install, without any office suite.

The vast, vast majority of users will never use more than 10% of these fonts.
All possible far Eastern locales are included, even though a Thai user won't
ever need a Gujarati font, or the other way around. (If they're a graphic
designer and they do, they know where to find fonts.)

Due to this, the font selection dialog is almost unusable. It takes so long to
load in Pinta for example, that I thought the app had crashed. Even after the
popup is displayed, scrolling to any actually useful font is very cumbersome.

Please see the attached screencast.

Localization is nice, but this is way overkill. A given user speaks 2-3
languages at most, not 40.

The installer already asks the user what language they want, but ignore that,
and bloats their system with all the possible language fonts.

Removing these fonts is non-trivial, and there are many threads online on the
topic:

* https://askubuntu.com/questions/820746/remove-unused-fonts
*
https://askubuntu.com/questions/214950/how-can-i-remove-fonts-that-i-never-use-from-libreoffice-and-linux-in-general
* https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?t=259109
* https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?t=297573
* https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?t=279672
* https://superuser.com/questions/248844/how-do-you-remove-fonts-from-ubuntu

Even very carefully-written solutions to this mess
(https://askubuntu.com/questions/214950/how-can-i-remove-fonts-that-i-never-use-from-libreoffice-and-linux-in-general/878501#878501)
come with the risk of removing useful packages. For example, after I ran `sudo
apt remove fonts-smc-meera fonts-smc-rachana fonts-smc-raghumalayalamsans
fonts-smc-suruma fonts-smc-uroob fonts-taml fonts-telu fonts-telu-extra
fonts-ubuntu fonts-urw-base35 fonts-yrsa-rasa`, I found out that,

> The following packages will be REMOVED:
>  bluez-cups cups cups-filters fonts-mlym fonts-smc fonts-smc-meera fonts-smc-rachana fonts-smc-raghumalayalamsans fonts-smc-suruma fonts-smc-uroob fonts-taml
>  fonts-telu fonts-telu-extra fonts-ubuntu fonts-urw-base35 fonts-yrsa-rasa ghostscript ghostscript-x hplip kubuntu-desktop kubuntu-settings-desktop libgs9
>  libgs9-common libspectre1 okular plymouth-label plymouth-theme-kubuntu-logo printer-driver-foo2zjs printer-driver-hpcups printer-driver-pnm2ppa
  printer-driver-ptouch printer-driver-sag-gdi printer-driver-splix
python3-renderpm


💥

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