Question about removal of thing installed with Desktop Environments.

English Applications
#1

I installed a few DE’s on that Toshiba hybrid graphic laptop because bumblebee would not work with it, and I with the help of several experienced users here got a couple that do work well.
I kept Xfce and Cinnamon(for now),and will look at Enlightenment(because it is touted as fast).

My question is about getting rid of the ‘dross’ left over after I uninstalled the ones I did not want via YaST.

Is there and easier way than going through each DE to find out what it installs, and removing them manually?

TIA

#2

Best to just leave them you can get into trouble because of dependencies… They really don’t take up much space and they don’t run unless you run them.

#3

I actually just leave them installed. The various packages are mostly usable across any desktop, so might come in handy at times. There may be other times when the other Desktops might come in handy.

They do not take up much space, and they do not interfere with your other Desktops, so there is really no need at all to remove them.

Personally, I like some of the programs from some of the other desktops, so while I use Xfce, I have a very wide and extensive range of programs to choose from.

#4

I can’t talk about a whole Desktop Environment but when I remove unwanted packages (which I’ve installed) I use the --clean-deps (or -u) switch with zypper rm
https://doc.opensuse.org/documentation/leap/reference/html/book.opensuse.reference/cha.sw_cl.html#sec.zypper.clean
note there is an error in the documentation above as the switch needs to come before the package name not after
again the simplest safest thing to do is leave the packages alone

#5

For what definition of “much” do such as KDE and Gnome not take up much?

On a minimal system with only IceWM, I did

zypper -v in patterns-gnome*

and zypper announced 331.3 MiB would be used by 314 new packages. Same thing with patterns-kde* announced 629.4 MiB would be used by 319 new packages. No matter how much space is free on /, I do not consider those sizes or package counts to be “not much”.

Don’t forget, you get to wait on updates processes and consume bandwith for installed software whether you use it or not.