Is there a way to uninstall fonts-stix and fonts-mathjax?

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Connochaetes

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On Trisquel 9, is there / will there be a way to get rid of fonts that are dependencies of trisquel-desktop-common, such as fonts-stix and fonts-mathjax? Manually deleting them turned out to be a bad idea. If there is no way, that's fine, too.

Connochaetes

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Sorry, I should have said "an EASY way".

I just found the thread "Trisquel 9 Beta - Cannot Install Gnome Desktop"; I wonder if the approach chaosmonk describes there would work for this, as well. But I'd probably break my system trying :D

chaosmonk

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> On Trisquel 9, is there / will there be a way to get rid of fonts that are dependencies of trisquel-desktop-common, such as fonts-stix and fonts-mathjax?

You can remove them like any other package, but doing so will also remove trisquel-desktop-common and some other metapackages. This on its own will not cause any problems, but it may cause some packages to be marked for autoremoval that you actually want to keep. You can avoid this by running "sudo apt autoremove" BUT cancel the command instead of confirming, and just look at the list of packages that *would* be removed, and "sudo apt install" and anything that looks important. This will mark the packages as manually installed, so the package manager will not remove them.

Another option is to install dummy packages with the same names as the ones you want to remove. If you want to go this route, do a web search for "apt dummy packages".

What problem are you trying to solve by removing these packages? It's possible that there is a less invasive solution.

> I just found the thread "Trisquel 9 Beta - Cannot Install Gnome Desktop"; I wonder if the approach chaosmonk describes there would work for this, as well.

I was not making a suggestion for end users to try. I was proposing a way for the devs to fix that issue (which is what we did).

Connochaetes

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Excellent, thanks a lot.

>What problem are you trying to solve by removing these packages? It's possible that there is a less invasive solution.

Just cluttered font lists/menus. It's such a small problem that I feel I've wasted your time again; that's also why I wrote "If there is no way, that's fine, too." and "I should have said 'an EASY way'." I often scroll through installed fonts (I know that in some places, typing the beginning of a font name works as an alternative to scrolling, provided of course that you have a particular font in mind and remember its name), and I sometimes find such scrolling cumbersome, depending on the interface. So I'd like to prune the list by removing many fonts that I'm very unlikely to use. The work involved may be worthwile for me in the long run if I'm going to scroll through font lists as often as I have in the past. I also want to try out font managers for this, I think there was one whose description sounded like it allowed to define, hide away and bring back groups of fonts as needed.