Totally purging gnome and xfce

[Faceless79]

Ive searched the forum and havent really found a solid answer. Ive decided on using lxde on my xubuntu distro and want to know how to purge pretty much any remaining trace of gnome and xfce. Also how would i edit it to get rid of these options from the sessions menu? Ill be happy to post any additional info yall might need. Thanks everyone

[T.J.]

Ive searched the forum and havent really found a solid answer. Ive decided on using lxde on my xubuntu distro and want to know how to purge pretty much any remaining trace of gnome and xfce. Also how would i edit it to get rid of these options from the sessions menu? Ill be happy to post any additional info yall might need. Thanks everyone

You won't be able to remove every last little bit because of package dependencies. The only way to get around that is to compile the source code yourself, and that defeats the purpose of using a prebuilt distribution in the first place.

You can remove most of it by

sudo aptitude purge libgnome2-0 xfce4*
sudo aptitude keep-all

The first command will remove the core bits of Gnome and XFCE. The second will keep the package system from autoremoving things that it shouldn't because Gnome isn't installed anymore. Ubuntu is designed for Gnome, so a lot of things that depend on Gnome cannot be entirely exorcised.

Personally, I don't care for Gnome either. It has some really annoying low level bugs that are incompatible with scripts. They stripped out every option that was "too complicated" making Gnome akin to Windows - pretty but not very usable IMHO.

It doesn't even have a decent menu editor. Alacarte is a bad joke.

[XubuRoxMySox]

I too use LXDE exclusively, because it is so very lightweight and fast! My CPU runs quiet and cool, applications load instantly and run quick.

I'm very interested to hear if this works for you, since I want to try the same thing on another machine. I did it the other way around, starting with minimal and installing only what I wished. But I'm still a noob - how do I know what I need? I needed lots of help, but I finally have a super-fast Debian/LXDE mix that flies at transwarp speed even on an old hand-me-down dinosaur.

And the sweetest part was when my family saw it and used it to get on the web and stuff, they didn't even know they weren't using Windows. They were like, "No way!" When I told them they were using Linux. LXDE was so easy and familiar-looking enough for them to use it effortlessly (and compliment me for resurrecting that old ancient computer and making it run "better than when it was new").

I couldn't have pulled that off without LXDE's beauty, simplicity, and very small footprint. Now I'm an LXDE fan!

Please post if it works, and how else you might purge the unneeded stuff from a standard *buntu installation.

Thanks,
Robin

[Faceless79]

Thankyou for the responses i had a feeling it wasnt possible or advised to remove all of it but if i can get it down to a bare minimum thatll be great too, ill try it now and post back in a few

[Faceless79]

Ok i tried but didnt go thru with it, when i ran the script it gave me nothing but dependancy errors, i think ill just keep doing what ive been doing (using synaptic to pick apart un-wanted un-used gnome and xfce components) or i may switch to crunch bang

[XubuRoxMySox]

... or i may switch to crunch bang

I did and it was sweet - for awhile. But gradually some big problems began to creep in. The worst was forced shutdown. LXDE's logout stopped working and I had use a terminal command to turn off the computer:

shutdown -h now

Sound was muted by default on bootup and I had to keep manually un-muting it.

It looks like LXDE doesn't play nice with Crunchbang (in spite of the fact that a few LXDE components are used in Crunchbang by default). But keep an eye on U-Lite and the Lubuntu project.

In the meantime have a look also at MoonOS which has an LXDE version based on Ubuntu Intrepid. Access to Ubuntu repositories, Synaptic, all the good stuff.

All the best,
Robin