My Debian install on my IBM Thinkpad was fantastic . In KDE, all was fab. I upgraded to SID. Then I had a desire to return to Fluxbox, which I had not used on one of my main boxes for a year. I use it on some "donkey" office boxes at work and it's cool.

So. There I was and I thought, "This is lovely. A life without KDE and KControl. Perhaps it's time to remove KDE altogether (on this box) and live without it. I will learn more Linux!" I did {apt-get --purge remove "most of kde} and I felt soooo happy. I even removed KDM.

But.

Suddenly, all of my fonts in everything were horrible. Really horrible. Jagged edges and just WRONG. I added "gnome-settings-daemon" to my .xinitrc and my .xsession (just to be sure!) and was able to make some of my gtk apps look reasonable but nothing was right.

In the end, I reinstalled KDE. I mean, what are a few hundred MB these days? Nothing. And I did miss Konqueror. That didn't help at all.

My choices now are coloured by the fact that the fonts are hurting my eyes. I know that is a weak thing to admit but it's true. Do I reach for my Kububtu iso and reinstall? I have Kubuntu on another box and I like it. I don't want to use KDE on my laptop but if the distro is good.....
I can install Fluxbox aswell.

Or I can use Mandriva LE/ I have Mandrake 10.1 on 14 boxes. The fonts are all good but I haven't messed around with anything. I liked Mandrake but am wary of rpm distros for my own personal use (the laptop)....

In summary:
Did I remove something font-crucial when I removed KDE? Can I get it back? Do I have to have headaches?

Thanks for listening to my bleating.

I found a solution. One problem was that some fonts had gone missing --- do not ask me how. They'd just gone. I systematically reinstalled anything that seemed to have anything to do with fonts. I also changed the system font dpi to 92. Playing around in gnome-control-center reaped many rewards but the best reward came on a later boot of my laptop. Everything looked wonderful! I am not sure what happened here but luck and magic seem to have solved the problem. I am tempted to remove KDE again