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Topic: How to completely delete the DE and all its configs and other packages (Read 689 times) previous topic - next topic
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How to completely delete the DE and all its configs and other packages

I suppose everyone of you knows luke smith's LARBS
And i starte a VM, with an Artix base install, with nothing else and executed this script and I was in an perfect working environment. Just that I dont have enough USB sticks or their size to move every file I have to another re installed artix on my computer, and this would also be inefficient.

So I want to delete everything to do with KDE, its packages, apps, whatever there is. I, of course, want to keep all my data.
- How do I do it?
- Is there somethign I need to beware of? for example so that I dont lose my files and important Data?
- Anything I didnt think of? What can it break?

thx :3

Re: How to completely delete the DE and all its configs and other packages

Reply #1 –
If you want to transfer things between 2 network connected machines you can use sftp if you lack storage media. There are other methods apart from sftp, but that's pretty lightweight and easy to enable and use. Compressing things in a tar ball first will help.
If you try pacman -Qs kde you will see most of the packages have a bracketed entry after them showing the group they belong to, there are several for kde like (kde-applications kde-education) for example. So try something like pacman -Rs kde-applications kde-education and add whatever other kde groups you see installed to that list, -Rs gets rid of unused dependencies too, see "man pacman" for more info on that, so that should clear out the vast majority if not everything. Remember you won't have a desktop afterwards unless you have installed and set up another! As for the .hidden config files in ~/ you might need to manually delete them, unless someone else knows a better way?

Re: How to completely delete the DE and all its configs and other packages

Reply #2 –
Code: [Select]
pacman -Qett
will give you all packages that were explicitly installed that are also not required by another package. You could look through that and delete all the packages that you don't need with
Code: [Select]
pacman -Rncs <package>

You can clean your package cache afterwards with
Code: [Select]
pacman -Sc
Hopefully that will also clear up some space.

Reading this should give you some good information on how to do what you are trying to do. Don't break your system though!

Also, here is the sftp (sshfs) program that #### was talking about. It would be good for moving a large amount of data without USB drives. It should be noted though that you should copy everything first, then delete files instead of moving the files first in case something goes wrong during transfer.

As #### said, you will have to delete the configuration files in your home directory (~/) manually. Pacman won't touch those.

Tell me if that helps.

Re: How to completely delete the DE and all its configs and other packages

Reply #3 –
Most popular file managers can do sftp easily and seamlessly.
rsync is another option when you want to copy a lot over the network.  And it is the imho the better choice when you want things like permissions, ownership and links etc properly preserved. But does require a bit of knowledge.

Re: How to completely delete the DE and all its configs and other packages

Reply #4 –
That isn't the sftp I use btw:
$ pacman -Qo /usr/bin/sftp
/usr/bin/sftp is owned by openssh 9.1p1-3
Then if you have openssh installed, which quite likely you might already, you just need to install and enable the sshd service for your init on both machines. Then you do
Code: [Select]
x $ ip route show
y $ cd (dir where you want the files to go)
y $ sftp x-username@x-route
y $ cd (dir on x where files are)
y $ get filename
y $ bye
Where x is the machine you want to take the files from and y is the one where you want to transfer to. "man sftp" gives more details if I missed something, you can do more than that too, that's using it in a simple way. "get" in sftp just gets a copy, it won't actually remove anything from the source machine. It will give you an ETA based on the transfer speed, which might be similar to your usual download speed as it goes through your router, at least that's the case for me. So it isn't the fastest transfer method but it's very easy for occasional use as it mostly uses existing packages and connections. The get -R option won't copy links and things so you are better off tarring stuff up as an xz or gz etc. and "get"ting the result as a single compressed file to transfer.