Dev1 Galaxy Forum / Beowulf: how to remove xfce and install mate, without breaking system

Re: Beowulf: how to remove xfce and install mate, without breaking system

dummy@example.com (Head_on_a_Stick) — Tue, 29 Sep 2020 18:11:00 +0000

# aptitude install task-xfce-desktop- task-mate-desktop

Re: Beowulf: how to remove xfce and install mate, without breaking system

dummy@example.com (dev2cosmos) — Tue, 29 Sep 2020 14:48:11 +0000

Drop to other tty like say tty2 and

sudo apt purge xfce4*

then install mate.

Removing xfce4 this way probably take with it many dependence programs, so take note or uninstall one by one i think.

Re: Beowulf: how to remove xfce and install mate, without breaking system

dummy@example.com (bgstack15) — Tue, 29 Sep 2020 11:55:02 +0000

The way I would try to remove xfce-desktop would be with autoremove (or autopurge).

sudo apt-get autoremove xfce-desktop

The auto part will try to clean up any packages that were not manually selected, so that would include all the components that xfce-desktop had to bring in, that you had never named specifically (or did whatever the command is to mark them as not-manually-selected).
Beware that autoremove will try to remove all packages that are not manually selected, that are not dependencies of any manually-selected packages. So it could try to remove more than intended. So just be sure to look through the list of what it wants to remove before you say yes.

Re: Beowulf: how to remove xfce and install mate, without breaking system

dummy@example.com (Dutch_Master) — Tue, 29 Sep 2020 05:12:38 +0000

Find and install the mate-desktop meta-package in Synaptic. Mate and XFCE can happily co-exist, there's no conflict so no real reason to remove XFCE other then saving space on your virtual drive. If you still want to remove XFCE, there's an xfce-desktop package as well, see if that's installed then purge it and all of its dependencies. Synaptic is a smart tool (or rather, the underlying .deb packages) so it'll complain when you want to remove a package Mate relies on.

Beowulf: how to remove xfce and install mate, without breaking system

dummy@example.com (ofvergara) — Tue, 29 Sep 2020 04:03:42 +0000

hello devuan team,
I have a virtualbox installation with beowulf xfce.

I want to try it with mate instead, however, as you can see above, xfce is already installed in this system.
what terminal commands or synaptic file selections do i have to add/choose/delete to remove/purge xfce and then install mate?

I hope this switch doesn't break the system.

waiting for your insightful input.
cheers.