Xfce Forum

jimwg

Member

Registered: 2011-12-11

Posts: 67

Flushing Out All KDE and Gnome Traces To Run As Pure XFCE As Possible

Seasons Greetings!

While moving away from Mac OSX and experimenting with Linux flavors I settled on Debian with Xfce, but my small HD is now swollen with KDE and Gnome apps and files which I really won't need running Xfce exclusively. I know there's a thing called "dependencies" which are supposedly KDE/Gnome programs Xfce needs to run, but how much can I prune my system of KDE and Gnome? When I used the Synaptic Package Manager to remove KDE, I still see a whole bunch of KDE (and Gnome) programs there remaining. Is there any way to delete these without reinstalling Xfce from the ground up? (a long grueling task!!)

Thanks for any hints!

JimWG

Ion Silverbolt

Member

Registered: 2010-01-14

Posts: 31

Re: Flushing Out All KDE and Gnome Traces To Run As Pure XFCE As Possible

The easiest way to do it IMO is to wipe your root partition if you have a separate home partition. Then when you reinstall with just Xfce, all the Kde and Gnome junk will be gone, and your settings stay preserved in your home folder. You could also just backup your home folder to an external hard drive or flash drive, then copy the contents over to a newly created home partition after you reinstall.

There may be leftover crud in your home folder from Kde or Gnome, but it is almost entirely tiny config text files, and it's fairly easy to delete them.

lifeinthegrey

Member

From: Seattle

Registered: 2012-01-17

Posts: 52

Re: Flushing Out All KDE and Gnome Traces To Run As Pure XFCE As Possible

I agree with Ion, with additional caveat ... for certain things, you most likely will need to have gnome dependencies. Gnome-keyring is the most obvious one I can think of, but I also use network-manager-gnome (had bad luck with wicd). Also, certain programs will try to bring in gnome even though they don't need it.

I can only speak from a Debian perspective, as I have built a Debian Testing XFCE system from command line, ground-up, but its unavoidable. If you can get away with it (and with many apps you can), install with --no-install-recommends, or try just installing the -core package. Cairo-dock is a good example, because it wants to bring in nautilus, metacity, your mother, everything, but if you just install cairo-dock-core and the plugins you want, its all gravy.

If you are thinking of going the Debian route, I'd be happy to share the lessons I've learned along the way, just PM me.

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