On Mon, 28 Nov 2016 21:44:00 +0000 Rodolfo Medina <rodolfo.med...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi all Debian users. > > 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? > > Thanks for any help, > Sure if I was going there, I wouldn't be after starting from here... First, Openbox is a window manager and doesn't have much in the way of bells and whistles. Is that really all you want? If not, there is at least one light(ish)-weight desktop environment which uses Openbox, which is Xfce. There may be others, I haven't felt the need to look around recently. As for removing Gnome, tricky. I use some Gnome applications, but without the full DE being present, so I have some libraries installed. If I had to try this, I'd look through the dependencies of the 'gnome' metapackage, make a note of anything I used, to later reinstall, then remove the metapackage and anything it wants to take with it. I'd run deborphan, or in fact I'd run upgrade-system which I normally use to maintain my system, which recursively runs deborphan and will remove anything you haven't explicitly asked for. At that point, then one might like to think that the only gnome components left are those which you've explicitly installed, and their dependencies. Certainly the applications you don't use should be gone. Something that may still be there that has a fair number of dependencies is gdm3, the display manager. You almost certainly do want a display manager, unless you're happy to boot into a text shell and use startx to get a graphic display. A lightweight display manager is xdm, though I find that a bit too Spartan, and I use kdm. That has a fair number of dependencies as well, but I want many of those for a few KDE applications I use, so it's not a problem. Hopefully, there may be other suggestions to help reach your goal.. -- Joe
