Debian operating system

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Debian is a free operating system (OS) for your computer. An operating system is the set of basic programs and utilities that make your computer run. Debian provides more than a pure OS: it comes with over 59000 packages, precompiled software bundled up in a nice format for easy installation on your machine.

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What's the best way to remove packages that came with desktop environments? (lemmy.world)

submitted 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) by IndigoGollum@lemmy.world to c/debian@lemmy.ml

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I recently (a day ago) switched from Linux Mint to Debian and tried out several different DEs. I settled on Cinnamon but still have leftover packages and files from Gnome, Plasma, etc. Is there an easy way to remove everything that was installed automatically by a particular DE besides reinstalling Debian with just Cinnamon? Or do i have to go through all my programs manually?

I've already removed the DEs i don't like with tasksel, and i've tried apt autoremove but it doesn't remove anything.

If i do have to do this manually, is there a list somewhere of the programs that come with each DE so i know which of the four plain text editors and so on to keep?

After trying a few of these alternative programs, i've decided i will go through them manually since i like some that aren't from Cinnamon. Solutions are still welcome in case someone else has this same issue.

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[–] bjoern_tantau@swg-empire.de 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Not sure, but does removing the meta package and then running apt autoremove work?

[–] IndigoGollum@lemmy.world 2 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

Nope, that doesn't remove anything. 0 upgrading, installing, removing, or not upgrading.

[–] lemmyreader@lemmy.ml 3 points 1 week ago

What you can do is pretend to reinstall (--reinstall), download only (-d), for example for xfce4 meta package :

sudo apt-get -d install --reinstall xfce4

Then stop it after it shows you which packages it is about and copy and paste all the packages it mentions in a simple file (myfile) and execute that.

For Gnome it could be like this (leaving out a lot of packages to make the example fit on one line) :


sudo apt-get remove --purge baobab chrome-gnome-shell folks-common fonts-cantarell gdm3

As you can see do note which display manager you're currently using. Executing the file you made can be done with :

bash ./myfile