Arch Linux

logothete

Member

Registered: 2022-01-06

Posts: 44

How to properly uninstall KDE completely for GNOME?

As much as it pains me to do, I think I have to say goodbye to KDE in favor of GNOME, due to Wayland woes on the former that do not affect the latter. Unfortunately, simply having both installed isn't working -- KDE's fine, but GNOME theming is messed up, among other more minor issues. No workarounds I've tried have had any success, so I'm taking the second-to-nuclear option and trying to purge this machine of any sign of KDE, be that a background daemon, an app, a config file -- everything must go.
Now, I don't want to screw anything up, so I figured I'd pop in here to ask about this. In particular, I'm not sure how to switch my login display manager from SDDM to GDM -- what controls them?
Other than disabling kded and akonadi, are there other KDE daemons floating around I don't know about?
All help is appreciated!

V1del

Forum Moderator

Registered: 2012-10-16

Posts: 25,104

Re: How to properly uninstall KDE completely for GNOME?

Try to

pacman -Rnu plasma kde-applications

add resulting conflicts/review packages being removed from the target list until the end result looks sane (alternatively use -s instead of -u until you don't have a hard conflict, abort that, and switch to -u for the final list, e.g. on my system

sudo pacman -Rnu plasma kdevelop ksysguard plasma5-applets-thermal-monitor kget plasma-wayland-session kdevelop-php telepathy-kde-desktop-applets kde-applications kile kaccounts-integration libakonadi akonadi-contacts kalarmcal digikam 

clips basically everything KDE without taking other stuff with it.

For the switching question for SDDM and GDM. Systemd controls them and they all have logical conflicts regarding the graphical target symlink they supply, enabling one will disable the other and vice versa: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/GDM#Starting if you want to be extra sure disable sddm explicitly before uninstalling.

logothete

Member

Registered: 2022-01-06

Posts: 44

Re: How to properly uninstall KDE completely for GNOME?

This was definitely a start, and I got GDM working now, but a lot of things still seem to be left over. For example, this didn't remove kwin, akonadi, etc. Is there anything more... forceful?

V1del

Forum Moderator

Registered: 2012-10-16

Posts: 25,104

Re: How to properly uninstall KDE completely for GNOME?

as mentioned you can also use -s or maybe even -c "-c" will definitely include stuff you might still require, -s should not. Did you install single applications or groups or meta-packages? If meta packages this should be fairly trivial.

logothete

Member

Registered: 2022-01-06

Posts: 44

Re: How to properly uninstall KDE completely for GNOME?

I had thought metapackages. The -s argument didn't do the trick, but -c did, and now I've finally got a (fairly) compliant gnome setup, by purging as much of KDE as I could find. Thanks a bunch!