Tried KDE - Removing It - Seems to Be Removing Gnome Stuff

[nightmarcus]

Long story short.

1) I wanted to try out KDE
2) I used yum -y install @kde-desktop to install it.
3) I didn't like it, switched over to Gnome.
4) Am running yum -y remove @kde-desktop to remove it.
5) It's removing NetworkManager-gnome and a couple of other things that look like parts of Gnome.
6) Should I be concerned?

---------- Post added at 04:55 AM CDT ---------- Previous post was at 04:47 AM CDT ----------

Ok, so to answer this question for anybody who might be experimenting, yes, be concerned with this. For some reason using that dummy-kde command also gets rid of OpenOffice, Empathy, Gnome Network Manager, Google Chrome, and a few other pieces of Gnome. Guess I'll have to go package by package to 1) Fix my Gnome and 2) Kill KDE

---------- Post added at 05:04 AM CDT ---------- Previous post was at 04:55 AM CDT ----------

Question. So I ctrl+c'd once I noticed it was removing stuff I didn't want it to, and I've fixed gnome, but now I keep getting a message wanting me to "Complete unifinished transactions with yum-complete-transaction". Is there a way to "Cancel" these unfinished transactions?

[glennzo]

I don't have answers. Just a question. In this era of huge hard disks why even bother removing KDE? I'd assume that you probably don't need to recover the disk space that KDE has used. I think, but I'm really just speculating, that if I had installed KDE and then decided that I didn't like it I would just switch back to Gnome, disable any updates concerning KDE and move on.

Note:
I'm playing around with installing and removing KDE on a disposable desktop, Fedora 12. yum groupinstall 'KDE (K Desktop Environment)' wants to install 183 packages and 313MB. There is a yum groupremove option also. I've never used it so maybe I'll give it a shot and see if it wants to remove exactly what it installed. I highly doubt it.

[JEO]

Try yum clean all, that should cancel anything pending. The only thing I think it won't cancel is deltarpms stuff from yum-presto plugin.

[glennzo]

man yum-complete-transaction shows a --cleanup-only option. I wonder if that would be of use in this situation?

[nightmarcus]

Originally Posted by glennzo

man yum-complete-transaction shows a --cleanup-only option. I wonder if that would be of use in this situation?

That did it, I won't post the whole output but at the end I did get this:

Cleaning up unfinished transaction journals
Cleaning up 2010-04-18.02:43.42
Cleaning up 2010-04-18.02:45.33

I was actually just reading the man page when I got a little popup from Evolution telling me I had new mail and I saw this, you're awesome thanks!

[glennzo]

You're welcome. Glad it was helpful.

I installed KDE on another computer using yum groupinstall. 168 packages and 313MB. Now when I try yum groupremove it wants to remove 128 packages (what about the other 40?), doesn't tell me anything about disk space (not that it's too important) and includes several Gnome related packages. Since I don't want to destroy this computer right now I'll leave KDE alone.

[forkbomb]

Originally Posted by glennzo

I don't have answers. Just a question. In this era of huge hard disks why even bother removing KDE?

Under most circumstances I'd agree WRT to the average desktop or laptop setup. The problem is that all the Kfoo packages start glutting your GNOME menu. Since you can still load KDE apps in GNOME, this isn't necessarily "wrong" but it is annoying to see a slathering of KDE related apps that you're never going to use (and, frankly, want removed) get puked all over your menus.

At least it's annoying for those of us who have limited screen real estate on netbooks.

It was annoying enough for me that I ssh'd in from the machine with the comfy chair and the big screen and keyboard to do a great purging, a KDE package or three at a time.

The alternative as far as I can tell would be to:

1. Boot into runlevel 3, temporarily switch over to the plain network service (removing KDE will cause NetworkManager to get killed)
2. Run groupremove on KDE
3. Run groupinstall on GNOME
4. Run groupinstall on Office/Productivity
5. Make sure you still have important stuff like a kernel and yum and rpm and NetworkManager and so forth
6. Reboot
7. During the next week, occasionally find that you're missing an app you had before you ran the groupremove on KDE

It's a great use of throughput to be sure.

[glennzo]

One of the reasons I stopped using KDE completely was because of the menu entries in Gnome, but I'm just a Gnome fan at heart anyhow.

[forkbomb]

Well, not to turn it into another your-favorite-DE thread, but I never really was a fan of GNOME. It just happens to be the best fit for me as far as netbooks are concerned because of a few key panel items. (I've found it in my heart to forgive GNOME for hardcoding some dialogues under the assumption that everybody's using at least 1024x768.) I tried out KDE to see if I could beat it about the head long enough to make it appropriate for small monitors, but it was recalcitrant and it just wasn't worth the time. When it didn't take, I ran into the same problem nightmarcus did.

(Deep down I'm a fluxbox fanboy but my preferred proper Desktop environments are LXDE and Xfce.)

[smr54]

Well, to take this even further offtrack, you can duplicate many fluxbox keyboard shortcuts (or even use flux as the wm for LXDE) in LXDE. Add a $HOME/.config/openbox/rc.xml file and put the keyboard shortcuts in there. (Depends if that's what you like about the *box WM's--for me, it's one of the most important things about them.)

http://home.roadrunner.com/~computer.../fluxopen.html gives some equivalents for fluxbox key shortcuts.

[nightmarcus]

I'm just now trying out Avant Window Manager, never tried it before, it's pretty awesome. I prettified Gnome with it, got rid of all the panels except one and put everything on the panel. I like it.