Re: Uninstalling Gnome

[Darac Marjal <mailinglist@darac.org.uk>]

On Tue, Nov 29, 2016 at 04:12:52PM +0000, Rodolfo Medina wrote:
> Patrick Bartek <nemommxiv@gmail.com> writes:
>
> > On Tue, 29 Nov 2016 09:11:37 +0000 Rodolfo Medina
> > <rodolfo.medina@gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > > Brian <ad44@cityscape.co.uk> writes:
> > >
> > > > On Mon 28 Nov 2016 at 21:44:00 +0000, Rodolfo Medina wrote:
> > > >
> > > >> When I freshly installed Debian on my present system, I chose
> > > >> Gnome as my Desktop manager, then I switched to Openbox.  To free
> > > >> space, now I want to remove all those Gnome packages that I
> > > >> haven't used any more but am not sure what of them I may delete
> > > >> without perturbing the system.  How can I know? More
> > > >> in general, is there a way to know what packages one is not using
> > > >> and so can be
> > > >> removed?
> > > >
> > > > apt-get purge gnome gnome-shell
> > > > apt-get autoremove
> > > >
> > > > And go from there with 'dpkg -l'.
> > >
> > >
> > > Thanks.  But, my question is: how can I be sure and safe that doing
> > > so will not perturbing my system?
> >
> > A few years ago, I attempted to entirely remove GNOME from my system.
> > I had switched to the window manager Openbox and no longer needed GNOME
> > and all its parts taking up valuble hard drive space. It proved
> > impossible (or impractical) to do. GNOME lists OS parts among
> > others, lots of others, as dependencies.  Most of its utilities do the
> > same. GNOME is quite invasive.  So, a general "remove" or "purge"
> > gnome, etc. would end up removing most of the OS rendering it useless.
> > Even trying to uninstall its utilities and apps would result in similar
> > situation, a broken system
> >
> > To make a long story short, I eventually ended up reinstalling the OS
> > without any desktop environment, terminal only, then adding X, the
> > window manager, etc. It was the only easy way I found to be totally
> > GNOMEless.
>
>
> I wonder if it's possible to provide Debian a set A of packages and say:
> `please install these and only these and remove all the other packages present
> on the disk except the ones from which some of A depends.'  This would be
> equivalent of reinstalling everything as reported by Patrick.  Do you think it
> would be possible?

The package "equivs" seems destined for this task. equivs can create 
"trivial" debian packages which, typically, only contain dependency 
information. So you could, for example, create a package which depends 
on evolution, libreoffice and gedit. You install this new package and 
attempt to uninstall 'gnome'. apt should then, in theory, say "all these 
parts of gnome are no longer needed (because 'gnome' is being 
uninstalled) EXCEPT for evolution, libreoffice and gedit, which are 
still needed by $newpackage, so I can't uninstall those".

You just have to be careful that apt doesn't decide that "the easiest 
way to solve this is to also remove $newpackage", but you might be able 
to mark the package as essential, which SHOULD trump everything.

> Rodolfo

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