I want to remove xfce from my debian 12 system. What is the best way to do it?

  • AspieEgg@lemmy.blahaj.zone
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    38
    ·
    edit-2
    10 months ago

    I think that: sudo apt purge xfce4* sudo apt autoremove

    should do it.

    I’ll point out that the other answers here are also correct. It depends on how you want to clean it from your system.

    “apt remove” will only remove the packages, not the config files
    “apt purge” will remove the packages and config files
    “apt autoremove” will clean up the orphaned dependencies
    “xfce4” will only remove the DE
    “xfce4*” will remove the DE and most of the other packages that come with xfce

    • iopq@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      4
      ·
      10 months ago

      When I did this on Ubuntu, when I shut down I still see some stuff from xfce

      • AspieEgg@lemmy.blahaj.zone
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        5
        ·
        10 months ago

        Not every package that comes with xfce has a name that starts with xfce4, just most of them do. You may need to identify and remove other packages too.

        • iopq@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          1
          ·
          10 months ago

          This is why I hate apt

          In NixOS when you remove the package from the list of packages you don’t have the symlinks pointing to it anymore, so it is like it’s not there (you can garbage collect it)

    • RickyRigatoni@lemmy.ml
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      3
      ·
      10 months ago

      That’s a lot easier than my method of loading synaptic, searching the DE name, then marking everything for removal.