Change fedora 43 (dnf5) from KDE to gnome

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Hello all, I have a fedora 43 KDE install that I want to swap into a Gnome DE. Normally, I’d just reinstall the OS but this is on a surface go which are very finicky when it comes to booting from the USB-port. So in order to avoid that headache, I hope to accomplish this with dnf.

However, when I try to follow the commands on Switching desktop environments :: Fedora Docs - they are not adapted for dnf5, nor do they show how to remove the remaining files.

There is a guide for the opposite, migrating from Gnome to KDE, but it dosen’t really help me in my situation ( Switching from Gnome to KDE on Fedora — Flawless Rhetoric ).

I’d be very happy to modify the fedora docs if when I get help wrapping my head around this :slight_smile:

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Log out of KDE, to a console.

sudo dnf remove plasma-desktop

sudo dnf install @workstation-product-environment

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Thank you for the prompt reply. I could install gnome without issues, logged out and into gnome DE. Attempting to remove plasma-desktop yields “problem: operation would result in removing protected packages: plasma-desktop".

I don’t dare forcing removal of anything to avoid messing up my system, but please let me know how I could proceed.

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You can force the removal of plasma-desktop. You won’t need that with Gnome. You can always reinstall it is you want to in the future.

Possible easy way, use a different group remove command
sudo dnf remove @kde-desktop-environment

and if that does not work then proceed with a forced removal.

sudo dnf remove plasma-desktop --setopt protected_packages=

if that still doesn’t work or you want to see more about protected packages …

Go to dnf.conf with

sudo nano /etc/dnf/dnf.conf

and remove the plasma-desktop package name from the line which will be something like 

protected_packages=dnf, yum, rpm, kernel, system-release, system-release(again), systemd

then

sudo dnf remove plasma-desktop
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You can also double check what’s protected with:
dnf --dump-main-config | grep protected

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6

Thank you all for the kind advice.

For better or worse, I took the matter into my own hands and borked my installation with removal of `*kde*` packages. Which, removed a lot of packages that I couldn’t recover from. However, I managed to reinstall and learned that a surface go tablet can boot from USB as long its partitioned for GPT rather than MBR.

So, KDE is removed, and Gnome is installed. Problem is solved :upside_down_face:

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