On Tue, 29 Nov 2016 09:11:37 +0000 Rodolfo Medina <rodolfo.med...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Brian <a...@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. Good luck B
