Any fellow Linux users on here?

[Judge]

Now I finally understand how it's working for you. I tried a simailar experiment years ago but I was just using external usb drives. It worked OK most of the time, unless the number of drives plugged in at the time changed, then the boot order got changed and everything got funky.

Well, there's still one caveat to using removable SSDs, especially with different operating systems.

Each time I remove a different drive, I have to go into the bios and reset that boot order. Because I do it so often with distro-hopping and occasionally to update Windows, it's become second nature to me. But if I don't do it, it simply will not boot up at all. It's not a perfect solution, but it does allow me to avoid all the issues associated with dual-booting or a virtual machine.

 

[Judge]

Anyone into purging your OS of fonts you don't need? I get why OS developers incluse every language on the planet, but some of these fonts seem absolutely elusive when it comes to safely deleting them. I'm down to about 53 but I'd really like to get rid of these fonts which seem redundant, yet not system-related. Presently I can't even find them and I've checked most folders in Linux Mint where they should be, but arent.

Trying to delete them all in the terminal didn't work either. And the "Font Manager" doesn't even acknowledge they exist!

"TeX Gyre" fonts:

Adventor
Bonum
Chorus
Cursor
Heros
Heros Cn
Pagella
Schola
Termes

Or could it be that my word processor (Abiword) is hallucinating?

I finally found all these elusive fonts, deeply embedded in a way to discourage users from deleting them.

I got my bare minimum font number down to 27 typefaces that so far don't seem to have any negative effects on the OS or any apps I've used. Saving font's to a USB drive that I deleted helped, but there's still these other fonts deeply embedded that cannot be transplanted.

Pop! OS 20.04 can be pretty onery when it comes to so many fonts I don't want or need. Ugh!

 

[Judge]

I finally took the plunge and went after nearly all of those "deeply embedded" fonts. And it was a real pain having to delete them line-by-line based on searching for them in the Nautilus file manager. But this way I wasn't carelessly deleting entire libraries- just deleting the fonts I didn't want or need.

Seems in the case of Pop! OS 22.04, the main fonts you don't want to mess with are "Fira", "Liberation" (often associated with Libre Office apps) and "DejaVu". As for the "Noto" fonts, I successfully deleted all traces of them by purging them using the file manager. With this OS I haven't run into any case of where these some 237 fonts were needed. But it pays to be aware that other distros may prioritize their fonts differently.

One other thing about this OS. Be very careful in downloading apps that have both Ubuntu and Flatpak options. I found that some Flatpak downloads may not function properly compared to the Ubuntu ones. Then again, some work fine. When in doubt, best to choose the Ubuntu version first. The worst thing I found though was having downloaded and uninstalling both of them, which at times really messed things up. Had to go into the Synaptic Package Manager (similar to Windows' Registry) to delete every residual file left behind of the version I needed to purge.

Just be careful if you should be inclined to install Pop! OS 22.04. Like so many other distros, they don't automatically install or set up the firewall. Best to locate it in the "Pop!Shop" and download it before doing any other downloads after the basic installation. The one using the blue shield icon works for me...simple to use.

Despite some agonizing moments in customizing Pop! OS, it was nice to see that their LTS (long-term support) is based simply on Ubuntu's support schedule. Meaning just like Linux Mint 21.1, they both will be supported to 2027. Woohoo!

 

[Judge]

Just upgraded to Linux 21.2 (Victoria). Well, nothing wrong I can spot so far. Lookin good. Actually so far none of the Mint upgrades have been problematic.

Funny no matter what distro I try, I continue to always come back with affection to Linux Mint. I just wish Mint had more easily implemented choices in terms of alternate or custom GUIs. Stuff that doesn't require so much hacking as I had to do with Pop! OS 22.04 just to give it a more personalized look and feel.

Though the more I learn about "Debian 12" that may be my next distro to try. Could be interesting with being able to include so many major GUIs (Gnome, Cinnamon, KDE, etc.) all within the same OS when initially installed.

 

[Judge]

An update on removing various unwanted and unnecessary fonts from Pop!OS 22.04:

* Deleted all "Noto" fonts using the file manager (Nautilus) with root authority
* Deleted all "Arphic" fonts using the file manager (Nautilus) with root authority
* Deleted all "Droid/Fallback" fonts using the file manager (Nautilus) with root authority
* Deleted all "URW-base35" fonts using the file manager (Nautilus) with root authority
* Deleted all "Free" fonts using the file manager (Nautilus) with root authority
* Deleted all "Liberation" fonts using the file manager (Nautilus) with root authority
* Deleted all "League Spartan" fonts using the file manager (Nautilus) with root authority
* Deleted select "MSCore" fonts using the file manager (Nautilus) with root authority

This amounted to a staggering number of useless and redundant fonts. The thing is, some word processors can utilize technology like the font-manager to make all them not to show up while others like Abiword do not.

If you are using Pop!OS22.04, don't even think about removing Roboto-Slab, Fira or DeJavu fonts.
I downloaded the MSCore Fonts only because they were bundled in the "ubuntu-restricted-extras", which included multimedia codecs needed to run apps like VLC for my DVD player.

Being retired, I just have no need for the Libre Office Suite, the Linux answer to Microsoft Office. It's a great program, but I simply have no need for it all anymore, and just rely on Abiword for basic word processing tasks. There are also a few Adobe ghost/post script fonts that I concluded were best left alone, as they can potentially impact Photoshop in particular.

Unfortunately not all Linux distros are created equal when it comes to those fonts you MUST retain, and those you can safely remove. So it is imperative for you to google questions about any one particular font family you want to remove. To find out what operating systems use it, as well as a particular application. (You can safely delete all the "Liberation" fonts and still use Libre Office in whole or in part. Just be sure to change the default fonts in Libre Writer, their word processor.

Above all, understand that so many of these foreign fonts for other languages cannot be removed without root authority and the use of a file manager to locate most of them which remain hidden deep inside your operating system.

 

[Outdated]

Unfortunately not all Linux distros are created equal when it comes to those fonts you MUST retain, and those you can safely remove. So it is imperative for you to google questions about any one particular font family you want to remove.

Windows has a set of base fonts known as the Core Fonts that all programs rely on, anything else is extraneous.

Unfortunately I don't think there ever will be such a beast in Linux. Would be good if someone could lay out the convention for it though.

The problem is that there isn't one overall developer. Linux is a collection of thousands of different softwares all written by different people for free, they do it as a hobby. And they all use whatever fonts they please.

 

[Outdated]

An update on removing various unwanted and unnecessary fonts from Pop!OS 22.04:

Just another quick thought. You'll have to watch out next time you do updates that most of those fonts get put back in again as dependencies.

 

[Judge]

Windows has a set of base fonts known as the Core Fonts that all programs rely on, anything else is extraneous.

Unfortunately I don't think there ever will be such a beast in Linux. Would be good if someone could lay out the convention for it though.

The problem is that there isn't one overall developer. Linux is a collection of thousands of different softwares all written by different people for free, they do it as a hobby. And they all use whatever fonts they please.

Yes, it's quite evident. I also believe fonts are used a marketing gimmick just to subtly advertise a vendor. But it just gets preposterous to see literally hundreds of fonts showing up in a word processor. And then you still have to deal with the incredible redundancy of the most common and boring fonts that only typesetters can appreciate.

I'm just glad that I was able to figure out how to circumvent most of it.

 

[Judge]

Just another quick thought. You'll have to watch out next time you do updates that most of those fonts get put back in again as dependencies.

Good point. It's always possible. Though I figure in my case the only one that would most likely do that is if I were to reload Libre Office and get the Liberation fonts, whether I wanted them or not.

When loading Photoshop through Wine 8.0.2 I always make sure NEVER to include their font library. If you do, you'll be up to your eyeballs in more fonts you don't need. Incidentally, loading Photoshop 5.5 and Extensis Photo Tools 3.0 into Pop!OS22.04 using Wine 8.0.2 was no fun. Very erratic behavior in most of the multiple installation windows though eventually it still allowed me to install them correctly. (Not an issue with Linux Mint 21.2) .

When I used to do a lot of desktop publishing years ago I always cherished my more elaborate fonts that I can now load as my base font number right now is just a paltry 18 fonts.

 

[Judge]

Learned the hard way (reinstallation of Pop!OS22.04) no less than seven times, that to use an alternate set of icons requires them to be installed formally as a theme. Otherwise expect an unrecoverable system error when you reboot.

I manually installed some 127 Mac icons that all looked great. But the OS sure didn't like them as they weren't formal themes.

On my eighth installation things seem stable, though this time around I installed Numix-Circle icons as a formal theme in Gnome. The icons are all circular and look great, though the color of the file folders in the file manager (Nautilus) are revolting. I downloaded a utility to supposedly offer different colors and styles of folders, but have yet to figure out how to install it, presumably inside the repository folder. Ugh....

But the icons themselves are nice. I just can't stand icons that aren't uniform in some way:

Yeah, any app in Wine uses its own Windows icon like Photoshop on the right. Have yet to figure out how to circumvent that, if even possible.

 

[elgat0verde]

Hi!

I'm brand new to Linux and will definitely ask a LOT of questions to y'all so, apologies if they are redundant

Been distro hoping (Ubuntu, Lubuntu, MXLinux, Mint, Fedora) and will probably stay with fedora since I really like the interface.

 

[Outdated]

Any questions are welcome, and all of us were new to it at some stage. I'm glad you found one you like, but don't let that stop you from trying others.

 

[Outdated]

And the reason why Fedora ran on your older laptop when others had problems - most distros only ship with a "current" set of device drivers, supporting a wide range of machines but over a limited time period.

Fedora is actually a testing platform for the commercial product Red Hat Enterprise linux, us free users are their guinnea pigs. Because they need to be able to install on computers across large commercial companies and many companies retain computers as long as they can Fedora retains and supports a much more extensive set of drivers to cover older machines as well.

So Fedora is far more likely to run properly "straight out of the box" than many other distros.

 

[Judge]

One thing about Ubuntu, is that I'm up to my eyeballs in Snaps. Ugh. Firefox isn't so bad, but VLC, I'm tempted to go hunting for it through the terminal.

Meanwhile Linux Mint won't even touch Snaps.

 

[Outdated]

I'm not too fond of the snaps myself. I've been meaning to change back to Fedora again for a while now but I've been too lazy. I did it for my spare computer but not for the one I use all the time.

 

[Judge]

After a day of Ubuntu I realized that overall it just didn't float my boat. While similar to Pop!OS, it just wasn't what I was looking for. Ended up going back to Pop!OS for the tenth time. But this time I don't think I'll experiment with icons that may or may not be crashing the system. The Mac OS icons (all 127 of them) I converted to .svg format using Inkscape 1.3. For now I think I'll just live with most of the icons that are in the OS. Though I still found it interesting that installing those Numix icons as a theme worked just fine.

 

[Slime_Punk]

Noob questions ahoy (sorry!).

Is there a really lightweight distro that will just run SASM + NASM and pretty much nothing else if I tweak it? My plan is to basically just run a very lightweight distro in either VirtualBox (or an old laptop, as I have like 4 of them sitting around) as an ASM learning-tool without any extra bloat; I'm kind of sick of trying to get things like Processing, Purdata, Arduino and others to act like their windows counterpart, so I guess this would be a really isolated use case.

Mint seems pretty good for this, but I guess I'm curious as to how minimal things can go from there

 

[Judge]

Noob questions ahoy (sorry!).

Is there a really lightweight distro that will just run SASM + NASM and pretty much nothing else if I tweak it? My plan is to basically just run a very lightweight distro in either VirtualBox (or an old laptop, as I have like 4 of them sitting around) as an ASM learning-tool without any extra bloat; I'm kind of sick of trying to get things like Processing, Purdata, Arduino and others to act like their windows counterpart, so I guess this would be a really isolated use case.

Mint seems pretty good for this, but I guess I'm curious as to how minimal things can go from there

My experience has been that a distro that works on older systems remains a hit-or-miss proposition.

Though personally I've never messed with one like leaner "XFCE" versions. You might try Mint's XFCE or even their Mate versions, which are not as demanding as Mint Cinnamon that I run on my 11 year old system.

https://linuxmint.com/download.php

 

[Outdated]

Any Linux distro can be as light as you want it to be, what makes a huge difference is the Desktop Environment that you're running. I use the Cinnamon desktop, that's the same one that Mint uses. It's got a reasonable amount of features but it's not too heavy on the resources.

There are many different desktops you can have, one spouted as the lightest is LXDE. You can have all these different desktops installed in the one distro and switch back and forth between them to try them out. Simply log out, not shut down, just log out. On the log in screen where you type your password in there's a drop down menu of the different desktops you can load.

If you're going to install on an older machine then I reckon you're better off going with Fedora, better support for older machines.

https://fedoraproject.org/spins/lxde/

 

[Outdated]

Just thought I'd add a handy note for newbies. There's 2 mainstream branches of Linux - RPM and Debian.

For the average mug user the only difference this makes is what program you use for installing and updating programs.

In Debian you use apt-get eg: sudo apt-get install lxde
In Fedora you use dnf eg: sudo dnf install lxde

Also, Fedora themselves only give a very base set of software from their site and you need to load a third party repository if you want to get all the extra software. There's one specifically for it, just click the links on the web page to install the right repositories for your version, you want both the Free and the Non-Free. Non-free doesn't mean you have to pay any money, it's about the licensing.
https://rpmfusion.org/Configuration
P.S. when someone writes commands in forums like this you can just copy and paste them in to a terminal and hit Enter instead of typing them out.