I recently (a day ago) switched from Linux Mint to Debian and tried out several different DEs. I settled on Cinnamon but still have leftover packages and files from Gnome, Plasma, etc. Is there an easy way to remove everything that was installed automatically by a particular DE besides reinstalling Debian with just Cinnamon? Or do i have to go through all my programs manually?
I’ve already removed the DEs i don’t like with tasksel, and i’ve tried apt autoremove but it doesn’t remove anything.
If i do have to do this manually, is there a list somewhere of the programs that come with each DE so i know which of the four plain text editors and so on to keep?
After trying a few of these alternative programs, i’ve decided i will go through them manually since i like some that aren’t from Cinnamon. Solutions are still welcome in case someone else has this same issue.
What you can do is pretend to reinstall (–reinstall), download only (-d), for example for xfce4 meta package :
sudo apt-get -d install --reinstall xfce4Then stop it after it shows you which packages it is about and copy and paste all the packages it mentions in a simple file (myfile) and execute that.
For Gnome it could be like this (leaving out a lot of packages to make the example fit on one line) :
sudo apt-get remove --purge baobab chrome-gnome-shell folks-common fonts-cantarell gdm3As you can see do note which display manager you’re currently using. Executing the file you made can be done with :
bash ./myfile