I want to remove xfce from my debian 12 system. What is the best way to do it?
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 xfceWhen I did this on Ubuntu, when I shut down I still see some stuff from xfce
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.
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)
That’s a lot easier than my method of loading synaptic, searching the DE name, then marking everything for removal.
Thanks. This is helpful
apt remove --auto-remove xfce4
That’s the way. However, I’d like to add that when I used Debian, I regularly got leftovers after uninstalling things, especially when removing big things work lots of dependencies. So expect some dependencies to remain.
That’s just how package managers seem to work in my experience. Even using
--purge
on APT leaves behind a ton of junk.--purge
does not do anything with dependencies. You will need to explicitly remove all packages that are marked as installed manually, i. e. all packages that you pointed a package manager to install. If a DE was installed automatically by Debian installer, or if you installed it withapt install xfce4
, the only manually installed component it thexfce4
metapackage, and using the--auto-remove
flag will remove all its dependencies. But if you additionally installed any components or packages that depend on that components, you will also need to clean them up manually.But if you additionally installed any components or packages that depend on that components, you will also need to clean them up manually.
Doesn’t
--autoremove purge
do that?
Thanks
What is the best way to do it?
By uninstalling the corresponding packages, I guess … Don’t know in detail how Debian works nowadays, but there will likely a meta package or a package group you can remove to remove Xfce with all dependencies
If it was installed with tasksel that would be a good way to remove any dependancies like lightdm as well.