I want to remove xfce from my debian 12 system. What is the best way to do it?
I think that: sudo apt purge xfce4* sudo apt autoremove
should do it.
I’ll point out that the other answers here are also correct. It depends on how you want to clean it from your system.
“apt remove” will only remove the packages, not the config files
“apt purge” will remove the packages and config files
“apt autoremove” will clean up the orphaned dependencies
“xfce4” will only remove the DE
“xfce4*” will remove the DE and most of the other packages that come with xfceThat’s a lot easier than my method of loading synaptic, searching the DE name, then marking everything for removal.
When I did this on Ubuntu, when I shut down I still see some stuff from xfce
Not every package that comes with xfce has a name that starts with xfce4, just most of them do. You may need to identify and remove other packages too.
This is why I hate apt
In NixOS when you remove the package from the list of packages you don’t have the symlinks pointing to it anymore, so it is like it’s not there (you can garbage collect it)
You can combine all of those with
apt remove --auto-remove --purge xfce4*Thanks. This is helpful
