My installed desktop environments look like this on startup.
There are two entries of the Gnome and a lot of variants.
I would like to know how to remove the duplicate entries as well as remove Gnome entirely.
Any help is greatly appreciated
My installed desktop environments look like this on startup.
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what have you installed lately? pacman -Qs gnome ?
I don’t think I’ve ever explicitly installed gnome. I loaded up the i3wm variant of endavour.
Although I did install gnome-bluetooth and some gnome apps, the desktop environment appeared.
Why are there repeated entries?
Do you have the package gnome-session installed? If so, can you remove it?
I do have gnome-session.
Ξ ~ → pacman -Qs gnome-session
local/gnome-session 42.0-1 (gnome)
The GNOME Session Handler
For the time being I don’t want to remove it right now. Will all the entries of gnome be removed if I remove gnome-session?
what about the duplicate entries and where are they located?
Yes, they should be. The package gnome-session contains those entries.
It should be all of them. Try removing it and see if they go away. Gnome session includes multiple sessions.
I’ll try right now. Probably install it when I wanna try gnome.
An update
Ξ ~ → sudo pacman -R gnome-session
[sudo] password for korigamik:
checking dependencies...
error: failed to prepare transaction (could not satisfy dependencies)
:: removing gnome-session breaks dependency 'gnome-session' required by gnome-shell
↑1 ~ →
Removing it doesn’t work.
Try:
sudo pacman -Rs gnome-shell gnome-session
Use:
sudo pacman -Rc gnome-session
Review the list to ensure it doesn’t remove anything you need.
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This is still a dependency error
Ξ ~ → sudo pacman -Rs gnome-session gnome-shell
[sudo] password for korigamik:
checking dependencies...
error: failed to prepare transaction (could not satisfy dependencies)
:: removing gnome-shell breaks dependency 'gnome-shell>=3.34' required by gnome-shell-extension-appindicator
↑1 ~ →
Read up one post and try the command above. We posted at the same time
It seems like the gnome appindicator was the problem.
Package (3) Old Version Net Change
gnome-shell 1:42.3.1-1 -10.76 MiB
gnome-shell-extension-appindicator 42-1 -0.16 MiB
gnome-session 42.0-1 -1.44 MiB
Total Removed Size: 12.36 MiB
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@pebcak @dalto It seems unreasonable that remove the entire gnome desktop environment would only free 12.36 Mb . There should be more than that?
You didn’t remove the entire gnome desktop environment. You just removed the sessions and anything else that blocked removing the sessions.
Did you want to remove it all?
If so:
pacman -Rc gnome
Please review the list carefully. It is possible there is overlap with gnome and something you are running now.
Then remove orphans.
Yes there is. I use some gnome apps. Is there a list of packages which is specific to the desktop-environment that I can remove
It shouldn’t remove all gnome applications. It will remove some though.
Not that I know of. Removing DEs is more difficult than installing them.
Perhaps for more gnome specific stuff, you would need to look into two groups gnome and gnome-extra (for more info: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/GNOME#Installation)
You could list all the packages in each group:
pacman -Sg gnome
pacman -Sg gnome-extra
But you need to exercise caution in removing anything that you might need for your current system and WM.
thats why i say pacman -Qs gnome , to overview all over this 
but you finded is good
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This just made me realize how seamless it is to switch DE’s. I reinstalled gnome for now. What I would like to know is, is there a way that I can change the name of the DE name in the list of desktop environments to chose from at start up?