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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[–] brickfrog@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

On Debian Stable by default when apt installs a package it will also install Depends and Recommends. The package can't install without Depends so that one is obvious - for Recommends you can check your apt configuration running apt-config dump, it probably has

APT::Install-Recommends "1";

meaning those packages get installed too.

Knowing that, you could in theory run apt show PACKAGE-NAME to view each package's Depends and Recommends. So for example if you want to look at kde-standard then run

apt show kde-standard

With the above example you could use the information for Depends and Recommends to figure out which packages were installed alongside kde-standard. It would be a bit time consuming but could give you a starting off point.

Also note Debian repos are online on their website. So using the above example for Debian Stable you can view the same kde-standard info at https://packages.debian.org/stable/kde-standard , one idea could be simply to copy all the dep and rec package names and then paste them into a new script to apt remove them all one-by-one (or in one long command).

PS - I'm a bit surprised apt autoremove doesn't fix this for you, that seems to be the point of the command unless I misunderstood its intent :/