Is it possible to remove KDE, cleanly?

[tim8723]

To make a long story short, I installed KDE and didn't like it. But, if I try to remove it, the package manager (I use dnf) wants to rip the guts out of my whole system, including such basic parts as Xorg. Is there any way to remove KDE, cleanly?

I know I could always do a fresh install of Fedora, but I've been using this PC for two years and many applications and utilities are setup and configured the way I want them. I would prefer not having to figure all that stuff out, again.

Thanks.

[antikythera]

I don't suppose you took a backup first? How tight are you on HDD or SSD space? Could you afford to leave it there to avoid crippling your system or reinstalling?

[lsatenstein]

I would ignore the KDE stuff, as you can choose gnome, using the gear button at login time.

I felt the same way, until I started to explore KDE's alternate presentations. I did not want menus and drilldowns, and one kde option (available with a right-click of the mouse), gave me a mix of Gnome style (favourites) and just typing anywhere on the desktop. And everything that I tried with KDE worked.

Yes, if you don't like it, don't use it.

[tankist02]

Maybe you can remove KDE and everything else dnf wants and then reinstall whatever DE you prefer? Can Fedora handle that? Though it is a strange design - you install a package, but when you remove it suddenly a lot more gets removed too.

[antikythera]

Maybe you can remove KDE and everything else dnf wants and then reinstall whatever DE you prefer? Can Fedora handle that?

Fedora could but it's whether the user is able to deal with the mess afterwards and work in terminal to get a GUI up and running again. Also unless the packages are held in cache on the system it means a heck of a lot of downloads.

[tim8723]

I don't suppose you took a backup first? How tight are you on HDD or SSD space? Could you afford to leave it there to avoid crippling your system or reinstalling?

I'll check, but I probably don't still have any backups from before when I installed KDE. I'm not tight on drive space; I've been living with this for a good while. If there is no way to remove KDE without destroying the system, I guess I'll just have to keep it.

Thanks.

[tim8723]

Maybe you can remove KDE and everything else dnf wants and then reinstall whatever DE you prefer? Can Fedora handle that? Though it is a strange design - you install a package, but when you remove it suddenly a lot more gets removed too.

My thinking, exactly.

[HaydnH]

You should be able to use "dnf history list" to find out which transaction ID installed KDE and then perform a "dnf history rollback <ID>". This would undo all dnf commands between now and that transaction so if you installed anything since then or performed any updates you'd need to redo those transactions afterwards.

[tim8723]

Thanks, HaydnH. I'll look at that method. But, I'm probably just going to leave things as they are. Some day, I'll probably just do a fresh install.

I'm going to mark the thread as solved. Thanks for your advice, everyone.

[nourimane]

To make a long story short, I installed KDE and didn't like it. But, if I try to remove it, the package manager (I use dnf) wants to rip the guts out of my whole system, including such basic parts as Xorg. Is there any way to remove KDE, cleanly?

I know I could always do a fresh install of Fedora, but I've been using this PC for two years and many applications and utilities are setup and configured the way I want them. I would prefer not having to figure all that stuff out Pnr Status TextNow VPN, again.

Thanks.

Afetr the last migration and how KDE is developped, it does not really mess a lot with other desktop packages.
So I will say Yes, you can just remove it without any risk at all.

[tim8723]

@nourimane No, when I try to remove kde-desktop, it says it will remove 539 packages including many x11 packages and other, unrelated things such as the ruby language and my password manager. I assume these are things with certain KDE components that had been installed as dependencies when they were installed, but now removing kde-desktop wants to take everything with it.

Even with --noautoremove, it still wants to remove over 300 packages which still include much of the x11 stuff.

Thanks for trying to help!

Tim