My system was upgraded from 18.10 to 19.04, then to 19.10 and finally to 20.04. I have been using it for more than 15 months as my primary computer. This is a typical default Ubuntu installation with some extra manual "apt install"s.
I noticed that there are a lot of fonts and font variations (mostly Asian) that I haven't installed explicitly. Selecting a font in an application (e.g. in LibreOffice) is cumbersome because of the long font drop-down list box. Also, I think that having so many unneeded fonts will make applications slower and is a waste of system resources.
I would like to remove most of the seemingly unnecessary fonts from my system. However, I am not sure which ones are necessary for proper system and core applications operation. Are there any pointers on how to decide on this?
These are the fonts I purge from a new installation. Clearly, the list is not suitable for all users:
Note that the list includes
fonts-noto-cjk.If you try to remove a font package that is required for another package, you will be asked whether it is ok to remove that package too.
I use the Synaptic package manager for wholesale font removal. In the settings menu, 'Ask to confirm changes that also affect other packages' is checked, 'Consider recommended packages as dependencies' is unchecked.