[ F21 ] How to remove GNOME

[Bill Oliver]

On Sun, 8 Mar 2015, Suvayu Ali wrote:

> On Sat, Mar 07, 2015 at 06:32:22PM -0300, Martin Cigorraga wrote:
>>
>> I'm a newcomer to Fedora and still learning its ways so excuse me if my
>> question sounds stupid.
>> Now, I want to remove GNOME from my install as I use i3; from what I saw
>> there's no gnome-group or similar goup available, how should I proceed?
>
> I don't know why no one else has mentioned this already.  In my opinion
> it is much easier to install a minimal set, and then build your desktop
> as needed rather than install the default, and get rid of Gnome.
>
> I'm an XFCE user (with lightdm as login manager), and everytime I did a
> fresh install, I used the minimal image.  You can even do a network
> install.  During that I simply select the gui packages I need (some
> subset of XFCE for me).  This way I have a very small set of gnome
> packages.
>
>  $ rpm -qa gnome\* | wc -l
>  18
>
> I know 18 is not a very accurate count, but it is more or less there.
> Since you are using i3, I bet you can get the list to be even shorter!
> Often people say disk space is cheap, why bother?  I have a tiny 20 gig
> / on my laptop, so it does matter to me.  On my desktop, I don't care.
>
> Hope this helps,
>
>

Yeah, my answer to most of these "how do I do this complex reconfiguration thing with a box I've dicking around with for two days and have all sorts fo stuff gumming up the works" questions is usually "reinstall."  For me, anyway, it takes, what, 30 mins to reinstall Fedora <insert spin here> without the gunk I wish I hadn't added, but four or five hours chasing dependencies and stuff trying to "clean" a system that has a couple hundred packages installed I decided I didn't want.

A clean install is the chicken soup of system administration, IMHO.

billo