How To Remove unwanted DE's

General system Newbie
#1

Ok I tried searching the forums, google, And a few other more Niche places, and perhaps I missed it, but I can not seem to figure this out

When I first installed EneavourOS (which I’m loving BTW) I installed a several DE’s, so I could try them all out. Now that I’ve found one I want to stick with I was hoping to remove the extra ones to reclaim some disk space. I can’t seem to figure out exactly how to do so though

Any help at all would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance

#2

There isn’t a generic ways to remove DEs and some of them are more difficult to remove than others.

Can you share which DEs you want to remove and which you are keeping? With that info we should be able to provide some better help.

#3

Depending on the amount of DE’s you installed in parallel things could go massively wrong if shared and/or needed packages are removed.

Anyway if reinstalling with just the preferred DE isn’t an option, I myself would try the following:

  1. Backup important data :wink:
  2. Search the ArchWiki for your installed DE
    For example XFCE: Under “Installation” you’ll find the packages associated with a common install. For xfce these are …
  • xfce4
  • xfce4-goodies
  1. You can now try to remove’*’ these packages and their dependencies (which aren’t needed by other packages) with
  • sudo pacman -Rs <package_name>
  1. Repeat steps 2-3 for all DE’s you want to get rid of
  2. Maybe reinstall the DE you want to keep, just for good measure, with
    sudo pacman -S <package_name(s)>
  3. At the end run sudo pacman -Rs $(pacman -Qtdq) to recursively remove all unrequired dependencies from your system
  4. Reboot and hope for the best

‘*’ see ArchWiki: Removing packages; if need be, you can force the removal of packages, but this can potentially really harm your system so I’ll leave it up to you to read that article for the appropriate command

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#4

Sudo pacman -S <package_name(s)>`

That seems to have done the trick, thank you!!!

For the Record I installed Gnome, KDE, Budgie, and Deepin,
I’m sticking with KDE, I knew there was gnome dependencies I would still need, I use a bit of GTK based software, but Budgie & Deepin were just wasted space at this point

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