Is it normal for XFCE users to get KDE Plasma files?

Issues & Assistance
1

Recently during a pacman -Syu I received two KDE Plasma files:

plasma-activities (from extra repo)
plasma-activities-stats (from extra repo)

I have only XFCE (DE) installed and I didn’t find any other KDE Plasma files installed (using Octopi).

I removed both of the files and my system is working just fine.

  • Should I be worried about anything?
  • Is this normal to get files designed for another Desktop Environment?

P.S.-reminds me of getting VLC plugins when I don’t have VLC installed. (I deleted those without issues too).

keywords: pacman, octopi, KDE, plasma

2

Packages?

Only you can tell us why those would be installed;

pactree -r plasma-activities

Or

LC_ALL=C pacman -Qi plasma-activities | awk -F':' '/Required By/ {$1=""; print $0}'

So (these packages were) uninstalled?
I guess we cannot see the reason then.
Except maybe in the logs there might be the other packages that were uninstalled along with them.

That would be in /var/log/pacman.log

You could similarly look back to the actual installation to try and see the original reason then.

Under no circumstances were you simply ‘bestowed’ any kind of package from Cachy or Arch simply because. No matter what your DE is. No package is arbitrarily going to be deployed. Once an install is finalized then packages are only gotten through dependencies or the explicit action of the user.

3

Thanks for reminding me to check in the pacman.log
Nothing was there though, probably because I used stacer or something to clear out logs before I’d noticed the KDE files on my XFCE.

Thanks for giving it a shot. Nevertheless, I remember when the VLC plugins were installed on CachyOS and I never had VLC installed but low and behold, the plugins were there. So, reluctantly, I must say that you’re wrong… sometimes stuff ends up installed that’s not supposed to be there.

Of course, this current time is not about VLC, but it’s similar… stuff getting installed that the USER DIDN’T INSTALL.

Blaming the user isn’t always right, just as blaming the distro isn’t always right; blaming upstream isn’t always right either.

I wasn’t trying to blame anybody though, I just wanted to know if I should worry about it or not.

For example, if I didn’t install it and CachyOS and Arch didn’t install it, then… is this a normal thing? …or do I need to consider OTHER security or maintenance things?

I do my system upgrades manually only, and I try to peek and study the contents each time. That’s how I noticed, just like with the VLC stuff.

Again, I’m not trying to place blame.
Thanks for trying to help.
I’ll seek answers elsewhere on this [UNSOLVED] topic.

Peace.

4

No, I think you just do not understand.

I doubt that you either did not have VLC or a package requiring it.

Because .. sorry, I am not wrong about the fact you do not simply get extra packages added. That is just not how it works.

Maybe you did not know that you have some part of VLC already installed. Maybe you did not gather the phonon dependencies. Maybe something else. But no, you did not simply get vlc packages added for no reason or because some Arch/Cachy dev decided. And the same would be true for these plasma packages. But you are the only one who could clear up that mystery because whatever happened happened on your system. ex;

grep plasma -n10 /var/log/pacman.log

Blame was not even part of my interest or consideration.
The one preoccupied with ‘blame’ here seems to be you.

Should it be repeated again?
Packages are not simply added.
They may be added due to something like a dependency but not just arbitrarily added.
If you do not know why the packages were installed then maybe the logs have the info.

Then you should know.
What happened and why.

You seem very concerned with this blame.
I think you should spend more time ascertaining how package management works and maybe how this exchange in particular occurred.
I can only mention the same things so many times.
Look in your logs.