I am on opensuse 42.2 Leap. It is very very good so far! I am using Gnome and happy with it but installed MATE as well as I had previously had it on Linux Mint and wanted to try it again. I want to remove MATE and also KDE that I tried. But I have searched forums, googled everywhere but cannot find a straightforward answer to “What do I need to do to remove MATE Desktop Environment from my opensuse 42.2?” I don’t want to discourse on the merits of different desktop experiences or environments I simply want to remove it!
I have very limited disk space and like a “clean” system with only what I want on it. I have been very frustrated because everyone answers similarly rather than being able to provide the method to properly remove MATE. I also have XFCE installed which provides a similar issue. Is there some difficulty in removing MATE once its installed. If so it should be stated straight up so one can choose or not to install it.
It is very straightforward to remove in Ubuntu/Debian/Fedora, but apparently ot in opensuse??
Removing any desktop is hard and requires deep understanding of all environments that may be touched, because many files are shared across different Desk Environments removing the wrong once can break several DE.
zypper rm --clean-deps *mate* caja atril pluma marco engrampa
it will remove any package that has mate in it’s name as well as the well known mate desktop apps, it will also remove any dependency installed by mate, check twice as something else might be using mate’s gtk2 dependencies
if you are low on disk space maybe not use gnome as it’s huge and …(I don’t like it)
mate is rather small I doubt you will recover 100MB
… I have been very frustrated because everyone answers similarly /QUOTE]
Well, if you already got that remark more often, then I wonder why you did not explain that you have lack of disk space in your first post above. By not telling what is behind your question, you of course take the chance that you get such an answer again. The more because disk space (a few 100 MB at the most) is not something that is a problem for the majority of people. So you created your own frustration.
One sensible rule of asking questions on a forum like this, is to “Describe the goal, not the step”. See also http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html#goal. There is more applicable to the openSUSE forums there (though not everything).