Hello,
I’m somewhat a newbie, but I decided with tumbleweed anyway.
I installed tumbleweed with KDE Plasma, after a while I decided to give gnome a shot. I installed by ticking “Gnome Desktop Environment” under patterns, and so easily everything installed. Thinking how great this patterns feature was, I decided to remove gnome now. I thought unticking the same place (like I did to install) would do the trick, but it did not. Can you tell me how am I supposed to uninstall Gnome in this system?
I thought I could try rolling back with snapper snapshot (I heard about it - never tried before). But yast gave me error:
No snapper configurations exist. You have to create one or more configurations to use yast2-snapper. The snapper command line tool can be used to create configurations.
Maybe you could help me configure it, or should I ask in another forum?
For snapper you need btrfs as the root filesystem. And not having unchecked the snapshots item.
You could select the pattern in the Softwaremanager, then try to uninstall the packages in the list on the right. Simply right-click in the list, choose All Packages in this list, the uninstall.
Why bother. It won’t cause problems. Just leave it there, but don’t use it.
I have Gnome installed, just in case I want to test something. But I normally use KDE Plasma 5. Leaving Gnome there does not cause any problems for me.
I have btrfs as suggested by opensuse in install, but I had to make a custom setup because of dualboot. Looks like I have no config for it.
For deleting gnome, I was afraid that some of those packages in the pattern could be used in other patterns. I’m not sure if it was safe to delete them. I guess making the uninstall process the same with installing pattern could be great.
I am afraid I do not exactly understand what you are saying here. A pattern is a list of packages that are needed for the goal of the pattern. That may include packages that are needed by other patterns. Simply uninstalling all that is installed by the Gnome pattern could remove packages that are used by other patterns that still stay installed. Also, it is quite possible to run applications that are coming from the Gnome world in another desktop environment. Those will need a lot of Gnome libraries. Uninstalling them will make the application unusable. As said earlier, just leave it. It is only a small amount of disk space.
Well, that will de-install a lot of packages that have the string gnome somewhere in their name and that also apparently (in your case) are no dependencies of other installed packages, but is it the same as if you never would have installed Gnome?
Sure, since using openSUSE I installed on several occasions packages which have the string gnome somewhere in their name. At some time I completed the Gnome Desktop by checking GNOME Desktop Environment in YaST and installing the associated packages.
However the command tells you the name of the applications and patterns associated with GNOME. And it removes packages which do not contain the string in their name. In the past I found several times that new packages interfered with existing ones in a subtle manner. Often finding out which of the packages causes the problem is cumbersome. Currently nothing of that kind occurs. Thus I do not remove GNOME until some problems occurs. In that case I would prefer to remove all of the packages and reinstall the few actually needed in the non-GNOME desktops. To my knowledge /var/log/zypp/history contains a complete list of installs and removes since initial setup of the machine. This may aid in deciding how to proceed.
… but, of course, as pointed out by others already, there is no need to uninstall it, unless you are using a 60-GiB or smaller hard drive.
It only takes up a small bit of HD space, nothing really runs unless you use a Gnome application or log in to the Gnome desktop itself, as far as I understand it.
I can understand the desire to remove unwanted packages. zypper dup will potentially have more package changes to look through,
and it’s inefficient to be updating packages that won’t be used.
I did a lot of:
zypper info <package>
zypper rm -u <package>
zypper al <package>
…and also using YaST2.
But I’ve since installed Leap and don’t have any fluff. ;-]
Brainstorming about the pattern system:
I imagine something like a pattern with two subpatterns.
One subpattern is everything that is likely replaced by another DE,
and the other subpattern is everything they might commonly use.
That way you can at least safely delete one subpattern.
I see that installing different DEs on top of another is not a very good idea. But it may be a safe haven if one has problems through an update.
Most annoying thing is multiple apps for same purpose, filling up launcher menu.
But this time I have a more pleasant time with Tumbleweed, when I tried it a few months ago i was sick of it. And when I gave it time to bake on my machine it became better. UI annoyances though, I better learn all about zypper for CLI usage.
The only real safe scheme for keeping any system up to date is installing a second instance, preferably on a second drive. Use a leapfrog scheme when updating.
The smaller of my machines has one 840 Evo and one 850 Evo, 250GB each. Both have Tumbleweed installed on a 30GB ext4 partition. This approach is very conservative, but robust and comes with little overhead.
But this time I have a more pleasant time with Tumbleweed, when I tried it a few months ago i was sick of it. And when I gave it time to bake on my machine it became better. UI annoyances though, I better learn all about zypper for CLI usage.
There are two main resources:
Thanks to everyone for directing me for useful info.
I didn’t mean to claim that they break each other. Just may cause annoyances like similar apps to do same thing, of course this should be expected. One has to pick and uninstall the unnecessary ones. For example I would still try to use dolphin even in Gnome.
UI annoyances though, I better learn all about zypper for CLI usage.
UI annoyances though, I better learn all about zypper for CLI usage.