I always find debian = crap fonts. I've never worked out the cause of this pain, but I've had it happen with a number of installs on several releases.

I've fiddled around endlessly installing MS core fonts and suchlike, but I never quite seem to end up with fonts as nice as something like Redhat or even FreeBSD will give me by default.

At least the insanely-sized-GTK-fonts issue seems to be fixed now.