An issue I had in Linux Mint 22, Cinnamon Edition was that there is no font manager installed by default in the distro, which means you can't double click on a font file (a .ttf or .otf file) to install a font in the operating system, nor can you right click on them in Nemo, Cinnamon's file manager, to install the font from the context menu, as there is simply no software that handles this installed by default.
Observation: As a Windows XP user, it's insane to me that I now have my hands on an operating system that ships with a PDF viewer but not with a font installer. It used to be you had to install Acrobat Reader to view PDFs, but you could always install fonts. This feels backwards to me.
How to Fix
There are two ways to fix this: the sane way, or the way only a Linux user would think makes any sense. Let's start with the sane way.
Installing a Font Manager
1: open the Software Manager via the start menu and search for font-manager. You should find the font manager for the GNOME desktop. There may be others available, but I haven't tried them because searching for "font" in the Software Manager gives me all sorts of unrelated software.
2: install the font manager.
3: after installing, you should be able to open fonts from Nemo in the font manager to install them.
Observation: the GNOME font manager doesn't seem to tell you that you finished installing a font after clicking the install button, nor does it tell you the font is already installed if you open it in the font manager again. I don't know why.
Copy-Pasting the Fonts
An alternative way to install fonts in Linux is to copy-paste the font files to the fonts directory in ~/.local/share/fonts. I can only imagine the only reason one may like this method is because the GUI applications to install fonts are so terrible to begin with. Although this "works," some problems with it include:
1: ~/.local is a dotfile (or a dotfolder in this case, I guess). By convention, dotfiles are "hidden" files on Linux. This doesn't mean anything except that they aren't displayed by default in some cases. For example, even though you will have a .local directory in your home folder, Nemo won't display it to you, which means you need to press Ctrl+L and type .local in the address bar to access it.
2: fonts isn't created by default, which means part of the installation process of a single font involves literally creating a fonts folder yourself that is supposed to be a standard folder that the system will access. It just makes no sense whatsoever that the standard file structure isn't already there, structured, by the time the user needs to use it.
This method is great if you need to install lots of font files as you don't need to depend on the font manager supporting this basic feature.
Reloading the Fonts
Some applications, like Inkscape, may need to be closed and opened again in order to load newly installed fonts.
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