It is a bit of nuisance, yes. And it seems to get worse with every new OS upgrade, be it on Mac or Windows. These past few days, I've been busy setting up a new PC — latest versions of Windows 11 and of Adobe Creative Cloud — and without installing a single font of my own choosing, the InDesign font menu is already populated by at least a hundred fonts, most of which I don't plan on ever using.
By @Piet De Ridder
Microsoft has quite a bunch of fonts installed that come with their OS. Besides this, there are only a marginally number of fonts installed by other applications. But some applications come with an extensive number of additional fonts. That's part of the game.
Adobe, however, gives you full control over the fonts, with current applications, you won't have extensive font libraries on a DVD as with legacy applications: https://helpx.adobe.com/fonts/kb/add-fonts-desktop.html
And you can at any moment deactivate all the Adobe fonts, as Adobe applications will install them again, when a file gets opened, that uses those fonts. It is even recommended to clean-up the fonts regularily. If you are using non Adobe fonts, however, like Google fonts, you need to keep track of your fonts manually, or by using a third party application.
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