> Purge removes too much, usually not only the package but things that depend > on the package so it will break your system by getting rid of too much > stuff.
'apt remove' also removes things that depend on the package. According to the apt man page, the only difference between remove and purge is the removal of config files. Purge doesn't remove additional packages. "Removing a package removes all packaged data, but leaves usually small (modified) user configuration files behind, in case the remove was an accident. Just issuing an installation request for the accidentally removed package will restore its function as before in that case. On the other hand you can get rid of these leftovers by calling purge even on already removed packages. Note that this does not affect any data or configuration stored in your home directory." To test this, I ran 'sudo apt remove pulseaudio', looked at the packages that would have been removed, cancelled, and then ran 'sudo apt purge pulseaudio' and compared. It's the same packages, none of which are system breaking when removed. The only packages that were not metapackages or directly related to pulseaudio that were removed are indicator-sound and indicator-sound-gtk2, which were restored by reinstalling trisquel and trisquel-recommended. > You probably won't be able to boot into your Desktop Environment. This is a risk of purging (or reomving) packages recklessly, and you are right that one should be careful. However, in the case of pulseaudio I have done this before and tested it again just now. I purged pulseaudio, rebooted, logged in, and was able to reinstall pulseaudio, trisquel, and trisquel-recommended. After rebooting again, sound worked as it had before. > You can remove config files of pulseaudio manually, and just do a remove > pulseaudio This is what purge does. > Always be very careful with purge. It will break your system most of the > time. Again, maybe this is true with some packages, but in the case of pulseaudio I have just tried it myself and it was not a problem.
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