On Thu, Sep 10, 2020 at 11:33:21PM -0500, Michael Morgan wrote: > I recently installed Debian 9.13 on my machine.
So, not the current stable release.... > What is the correct way to > completely remove GUI? Well, in this *particular* case, your best course of action would probably be a clean install of Debian 10. Select only "Standard" (or maybe add the OpenSSH server) during the initial task selection. In the more general case, there are two strategies to remove a whole bunch of packages that have a dependency tree relationship. The first strategy, which is relatively new, is to count on "apt autoremove", which is a relatively new feature and has a lot of quirky behavior. The concept here is that, when you installed the top-level package of the large dependency tree (whether that's "gnome-core" or "task-something"), apt will have marked that one package as "manually installed", and anything else that was brought in at the same time, would not be so marked. Then, when you want to remove all of them, you first remove the same top-level package. This doesn't do much on its own, but now all of the dependent packages have nothing anchoring them. So if you follow up with an "apt autoremove", it should, in theory, remove all of the dependent packages. In my experience, that doesn't work very well, so I've disabled autoremove on my system. The other strategy, which is a much older one, relies on you performing a light analysis of the dependency tree and finding some lynchpin package that is holding the whole thing up. E.g. with GNOME 2.x, there was some package like "libgnome-common" or something. If you removed that, it would remove everything else, because everything in GNOME depended (directly or indirectly) on this one package. In the case of a desktop environment, you really have two different dependency trees to worry about. There's the X server (xorg), and there's the desktop environment (task-gnome-or-whatever). You can perform a separate analysis on each of these trees, identify which low-level libraries or "common" packages are necessary to hold them up, and remove those. Or, as we've said a few times now, you can just leave the packages in place and ignore them. Or do a clean install.