I've been dealing with this absolutely bizarre issue for a few weeks now where installed fonts seem to be "forgotten" on boot. My desktop is a combination of tiling window manager (i3) and status bar (polybar), and when I start up my computer I find that the compact bitmap font (curie, manually installed) that the status bar is supposed to use has been replaced by a much larger and uglier font.

After digging around to see if either of the above programs were the cause of it (some change made to the status bar's configuration when updating the program, etc.), I discovered that apparently the font I assigned to the status bar was no longer part of the system font cache--"fc-list | grep curie" returns nothing. The bizarre part is, the font files are still in their directory in /usr/share/fonts/, and running "sudo fc-cache -fv" results in the fonts both appearing on my status bar and showing up when I run "fc-list."

But this has become a regular issue as I said for several weeks--it took some time to recognize this as a persistent issue and not just some accidental consequence of me mucking around somewhere that I shouldn't have. If I had to try and be more specific I'd say the problem has existed since kernel 5.7 was released in F32 (not saying I think it's kernel-related, but that's the only milestone I can think of to date this problem).

I know very little about how fonts work in Linux in general and am hoping someone could shed some light on why this may be happening. In my limited understanding, it seems like something is happening to my font cache at shutdown/startup that is causing at least some fonts to be excluded even though they are still installed in the system font directory. I'm assuming some other program/process is making some sort of change to the font cache, but as this is the system and not user font directory, wouldn't said program/process need to have elevated permissions to make these changes? How would I even begin trying to track down what's responsible for this issue?

Thank you in advance.