2y ago

How do I remove a DE from debian?

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

28 comments

Enjoy your bian, I guess.
- Hahaha.. thanks for the Chuckle..
- Nice joke. That is clever
  
  Thanks
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
- You can combine all of those with apt remove --auto-remove --purge xfce4*
  
  hat would be a good way to remove any depe
  apt --purge autoremove xfce4
- When 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.
- 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.
- 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
Open up Synaptic, search up all the packages that say stuff about XFCE, mark them for removal, and then apply all the changes.
You can run sudo apt purge xfce4 (if you wan to remove all of its components and dependencies) or sudo apt remove xfce4.
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If you don't have an other DE installed, I suggest you find one and do it form the other DE, because if you don't, you're gonna end up without a graphical environement, and you would have to do everything frop the terminal.
- sudo
  debian :D
  
  What?
If it was installed with tasksel that would be a good way to remove any dependancies like lightdm as well.

28 comments