It's fine to remove ubuntu-desktop if you don't plan to use the default
selection of software we recommend. The downside is that upgrades are
less well-tested without it, and if and when you upgrade to the next
version of Ubuntu then you may find that new features don't get
installed automatically (this is because we now assume that you're
taking control of your software selection and probably want to make this
choice yourself), and the Canonical support department only accept bugs
on an Ubuntu desktop system if you have the whole thing installed just
to cut down on the sheer number of permutations they have to be trained
on. Aside from that there's nothing preventing you from removing
components of the operating system if you like. With the exception that
you need to take more control during upgrades, the operating system is
entirely functional without ubuntu-desktop.
As far as the details of your removal list go, the worst of this is
because 'totem*' doesn't mean what you think (it's a regex matching any
package name with 'tote' somewhere in the middle of it immediately
followed by zero or more 'm's) and this also removes libtotem-plparser1
which gedit et al need. I'd suggest removing packages individually
rather than using regex removals if you want to have minimal impact. You
claimed that binutils was being removed along with ubuntu-desktop, but
this isn't true - your log shows that binutils-static was being removed,
which is quite different, as this is a package containing the ld tool
used for linux-restricted-modules. If you aren't using the restricted
modules then there's no harm in removing this.
** Changed in: ubuntu-meta (Ubuntu)
Status: Needs Info => Rejected
--
Choice Not Microsoft
https://launchpad.net/bugs/85673
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