The officially official Devuan Forum!

ofvergara

Member

Registered: 2020-07-17

Posts: 18  

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

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.

Dutch_Master

Member

Registered: 2018-05-31

Posts: 285  

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

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.

bgstack15

Member

Registered: 2018-02-04

Posts: 205  

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

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.

---

This space intentionally left blank.

dev2cosmos

Member

Registered: 2020-09-29

Posts: 12  

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

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.

Head_on_a_Stick

Member

From: London

Registered: 2019-03-24

Posts: 3,125  

Website

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

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

---

Brianna Ghey — Rest In Power