Cleaning up after Installing KDE-Plasma over Fedora Workstation (Gnome)

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1

Hey people,

I’ve just installed Plasma on my existing Gnome Spin of Fedora ( A lot nicer than I remember the last time I tried KDE ), I wanted to avoid installing everything from scratch but now I would like to remove the Gnome dependencies and defaults that might still be around.

I don’t really know how to to it other than deleting everything named gnome-something.

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I would say that you could remove the group “Fedora Workstation”
after you installed the group “KDE Plasma Workspaces”

Did you try this?

3

It is harder to do it after the fact. Normally you would use dnf swap or dnf shell to remove the old group and install the new group at the same time.

If it was me I would probably use dnf shell, remove @gnome-desktop install @kde-desktop and then start the transaction. It should figure out what it actually needs to remove based on the current packages installed on your system.

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4

Isn’t that dangerous if done that way? I would think there are a lot of packages in Fedora Workstation that are also needed for plasma.

5

Probably yes … so i would do it in a virtual environment first to check if it works.

sudo dnf group list

Available Environment Groups:
   Fedora Custom Operating System
   Minimal Install
   Fedora Server Edition
   Fedora Workstation
   Fedora Cloud Server
   KDE Plasma Workspaces
   Xfce Desktop
   LXDE Desktop
   LXQt Desktop
   Cinnamon Desktop
   Sugar Desktop Environment
   Deepin Desktop
   Development and Creative Workstation
   Web Server
   Infrastructure Server
   Basic Desktop
   i3 desktop

Available Groups:
   3D Printing
   Administration Tools
   Audio Production
   Authoring and Publishing
   C Development Tools and Libraries
   Cloud Infrastructure
   Cloud Management Tools
   Compiz
   Container Management
   D Development Tools and Libraries
   Design Suite
   Development Tools
   Domain Membership
   Fedora Eclipse
   Editors
   Educational Software
   Electronic Lab
   Engineering and Scientific
   FreeIPA Server
   Headless Management
   Milkymist
   Network Servers
   Neuron Modelling Simulators
   Office/Productivity
   Pantheon Desktop
   Python Classroom
   Python Science
   Robotics
   RPM Development Tools
   Security Lab
   Text-based Internet
   Window Managers
   Deepin Desktop Environment
   GNOME Desktop Environment
   Graphical Internet
   KDE (K Desktop Environment)
6

I solved it partially, I thought about removing the “Fedora Worktation” group but there were a few packages that I didn’t want to remove. In the end I just ran dnf remove \*gnome\* and checked what was going out. The only application in my case that I wanted to keep was Lutris, which was easilly reinstalled with no loss since the config files were all kept. With that I managed to remove the more disruptive gnome dependencies, like Nautilus that would pop up sometimes despite not beeing the default file browser.

Its important to note, if you want to remove gnome-shell itself you need to remove it from the list of protected packages in /etc/dnf/protected.d

In the end I wouldn’t say its safe for anyone to do it, I just so hapened to not be using any app that would be removed this way, it could be different in each setup, so I would recommend anyone trying to check carefully the list of removed packages before proceding.

Anyway, turns out KDE isn’t working very well with an HDD ( At least I suspect that’s the problem ) so I reinstalled gnome-shell while I figure that out. dnf group install “Fedora Workstation” did the job perfectly, I had to do very little to get my gnome environment to the way it was before I made the change.

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Wow Dude ! I had no idea I could do this, it would have spared me so much trouble. It’s actually impressing I never came across it while researching how to install KDE.

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