Hello, I migrated to niri + noctalia shell as my new main setup and now I wonder how I can safely remove gnome desktop environment and stuff it carries, without breaking possible dependencies for some apps? I also installed ly instead of gdm as my login manager
the safe way:
- safe your system with timeshift. In case of errors you always can step back to a point where everything was working.
sudo pacman -Rns gnome-desktop
this will give you an answer like "not possible because of app-xyz needs gnome-desktop.
Next command:
sudo pacman -Rns gnome-desktop app-xyz
then you are in control about what to delete and what you need.
Will take some time but is safe, as you can manually decide what you would like to be installed and what can be deleted.
Same with
sudo pacman -Rns gdm
Can be done in octopi (if you prefer a GUI) as well, search/select the groups gnome, gnome-circle, gnome-extra for all the apps you would not need anymore
This is how I did it on one of my systems when I replaced GNOME with Cosmic (btw: unbelivable how fast this DE is on low memory/old notebooks)
@Zauberer-Merlin i’ve got quite far, but deleting nautilus isn’t working:
removing nautilus breaks dependency ‘nautilus’ required by xdg-desktop-portal-gnome
removing xdg-desktop-portal-gnome breaks dependency ‘xdg-desktop-portal-gnome’ required by cachyos-niri-noctalia
since another stuff is required by cachyos-niri-noctalia.
Any ways to proceed here?
hm - not really … if “portal-gnome” is needed by “noctalia”, and if you need noctalia … then … you need portal-gnome as a dependency as well …
This is why the I advised you to do this manual … not to delete something that is used by you …
Always remember: GNOME is much more than a pure DE, GNOME and the related libraries / GTK, … are used my many applications. It is more a development environment than a pure DE … makes it sometimes easy and sometimes more difficult … but this is how it is.
So - why not just leave it installed?! I would’nt care about …