Remove kde

Ask Fedora
1

I’ve found a few KDE application on my F42 installations so I did

dnf remove kde*

Is that the proper way to uninstall kde related software?

2

Your shell will expand the glob (assuming you haven’t set noglobbing) before dnf sees the command so you want to quote kde* with single quotes as in sudo dnf remove 'kde*'.

Caveat emptor.

3

That will uninstall everything preceded by kde. Like @anothermindbomb says, you’ve been warned.

You say you have found a few applications. What are those applications called? You can either uninstall them individually and then remove any orphaned packages left behind, or you can go nuclear and remove pretty much all traces of kde, plasma, qt and kde frameworks.

In Fedora most KDE packages are named with a k*. Calculator becomes kcalc, characters is kcharacters, mahjongg is kmahjongg, et cetera. Know the name of the application before you start removing stuff.

For example;

The command below will remove each individual kde or qt application you’ve identified.

sudo dnf remove kcalc kcharacters kruler kmahjongg krdc mediawriter

The command below will nuke absolutely everything related to kde, plasma, qt and kde frameworks. The @kde-* glob is for kde software groups, incase you’ve previously installed KDE via the live *.iso. (By default I think @kde-apps @kde-desktop @kde-media and @kde-pim are installed if you use the KDE Spin live *.iso). sddm is of course the login manager for KDE.

sudo dnf remove @kde-* kf5* kf6* plasma* qt5* qt6* sddm*

The command below will remove any orphaned packages left behind from the above, or other previous uninstalling.

sudo dnf autoremove

Be aware that some packages in GNOME / Cosmic / XFCE / Cinnamon / MATE or whatever other thing you’re messing around with might rely on kf5, kf6, plasma, qt5 or qt6 and try and pull even more out of your system. In which case you want to use the first command that specifies individual kde or qt apps.

If you’re experimenting and messing around with different DEs and different toolkits and frameworks and applications, unless you have an actual need to be doing it on bare metal, I would recommend doing it in a VM. Then you can “try before you buy” to bare metal.

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