Arch Linux

albertos

Member

Registered: 2020-04-05

Posts: 1

Mate DE: remove Window Borders, Icons and Controls

Hello, for some project in Mate I would need to remove almost all installed Window Borders, Icons and Controls shown in Appearance Preferences. Maybe someone knows how to remove them via Package manager?

Mate Version: 1.24.0
Windows Borders to remove: Dopple, DustBlue, eOS, Esco, Gorilla, Motif, Raleigh, Spidey, Splint and WinMe
Icons to remove: Adwaita, Boston Breath, Contrast High, GNOME, MATE and Menta
Controls to remove: GreenLaguna, Green-Submarine, BlueMenta, Clearlooks and HighContrastInverse

pvenk

Member

Registered: 2019-02-23

Posts: 4

Re: Mate DE: remove Window Borders, Icons and Controls

Hello,

Would you please provide some context about your problem and what you are trying to achieve by removing icon themes and GTK themes (which provide "Controls" and "Window Border" in the MATE Control Center)? There may be a better solution to your problem. (See also: "The XY Problem")

Removing all of the themes that you have mentioned cannot be done in a neat way because some of them are required by important packages. For example, adwaita-icon-theme is a dependency of gtk3, a toolkit used by many GUI programs, and the Raleigh icon theme comes from the packages marco (MATE's window manager) and gtk2 (an older version of GTK which is still used by some GUI programs).

If all you want to do is to remove a few unneeded icon themes and GTK themes, then you may find the following information helpful:

Icon themes are stored in /usr/share/icons and GTK themes are stored in /usr/share/themes. To find out what package owns a directory or file, you can run

$ pacman -Qo $path

and to find a complete list of files owned by a package, you can run

$ pacman -Ql $package

(replacing $path with the path and $package with the package).

To remove a package and all dependencies that were installed due to the package, you can run:

# pacman -Rs $package

This command will exit with an error if $package is required by another package on your system.

In addition,

$ pacman -Qi $package

will give information about a package, including its dependencies and packages that depend on it.

I hope this is helpful; feel free to follow up with any more questions or details.