Patrick Bartek <nemomm...@gmail.com> writes: > On Tue, 29 Nov 2016 09:11:37 +0000 Rodolfo Medina > <rodolfo.med...@gmail.com> wrote: > >> Brian <a...@cityscape.co.uk> writes: >> >> > On Mon 28 Nov 2016 at 21:44:00 +0000, Rodolfo Medina wrote: >> > >> >> 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? >> > >> > apt-get purge gnome gnome-shell >> > apt-get autoremove >> > >> > And go from there with 'dpkg -l'. >> >> >> Thanks. But, my question is: how can I be sure and safe that doing >> so will not perturbing my system? > > A few years ago, I attempted to entirely remove GNOME from my system. > I had switched to the window manager Openbox and no longer needed GNOME > and all its parts taking up valuble hard drive space. It proved > impossible (or impractical) to do. GNOME lists OS parts among > others, lots of others, as dependencies. Most of its utilities do the > same. GNOME is quite invasive. So, a general "remove" or "purge" > gnome, etc. would end up removing most of the OS rendering it useless. > Even trying to uninstall its utilities and apps would result in similar > situation, a broken system > > To make a long story short, I eventually ended up reinstalling the OS > without any desktop environment, terminal only, then adding X, the > window manager, etc. It was the only easy way I found to be totally > GNOMEless.
I wonder if it's possible to provide Debian a set A of packages and say: `please install these and only these and remove all the other packages present on the disk except the ones from which some of A depends.' This would be equivalent of reinstalling everything as reported by Patrick. Do you think it would be possible? Rodolfo