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.

  • monovergent@lemmy.ml
    2·
    2 days ago

    The desktop environment packages that tasksel uses (task-gnome-desktop, task-kde-desktop, etc) can be found towards the bottom of the list at: https://packages.debian.org/trixie/task-desktop. In theory, you can just uninstall the task-your-desktop package which takes away everything that DE came with. If that doesn’t work or doesn’t play well your earlier manual uninstallations, take note of the dependencies that the task packages pulled (including recommendations) and go about uninstalling the dependencies layer by layer.

  • Brickfrog@lemmy.dbzer0.com
    1·
    2 days 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 :/

    • IndigoGolemOP
      2·
      3 days ago

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

      • lemmyreader@lemmy.mlEnglish
        3·
        2 days 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