Amazed by flexibility of Kubuntu

[abear]

I have to say, I'm amazed at the flexibility of Kubuntu / Ubuntu. I am currently using 11.10 and I've been curious about trying out Ubuntu / Unity so I decided to load Ubuntu in with Kubuntu using apt-get install Ubuntu. All went very well so after s few days I thought I would stick with Ubuntu and remove Kubuntu, pasting the needed commands into to a terminal from a website called pure Ubuntu. Again all went very well and I was left with a fairly clean Ubuntu system.

After about a week I began to miss some the customization of Kubuntu and thought, well if it works one way it should work the other. So I opened a terminal window and typed in sudo apt-get install kubuntu-desktop. Everything worked better then I expected, so now I needed to remove Ubuntu. Doing a little searching I found a different website offering pure Kubuntu. I pasted the commands into a terminal and yes, you guessed it, I am pretty much right were I started a week ago. No loss of data, everything working fine. I did have to reinstall some programs going both ways. They included Chrome, VLC, and Thunderbird when coming back to Kubuntu, other then that nothing really out of the ordinary.

I do have the commands / website address if anyone is interested. Really not that hard to find in fact there were a number of sites offering the information as to how to add and remove different Desktop Environments including the Kubuntu forum. As I stated, I am just amazed as to how flexible Kubuntu / Ubuntu is and this experience solidified my belief and support for all the Linux community has done to make it a great OS.

Just thought I would share my experience. I still can't wipe the smile off my face, you see I think of myself as just a novice even though I have been using Linux for about 5 years. I know just enough to mess things up royal, so when they work better then expected it brings me to the realization of how solid Linux aka Kubuntu / Ubuntu really is.

[DoYouKubuntu]

Re: Amazed by flexibility of Kubuntu

Great story. Thanks for sharing.

I've used Kubuntu since its first release and just keep getting happier with it. Welcome to the club!

[Jonas]

Re: Amazed by flexibility of Kubuntu

Nice to hear! I never been able to do that switch and be satisfied with it, I tend to have some gtk artefacts for some reason, please share that link.

I do have the commands / website address if anyone is interested. Really not that hard to find in fact there were a number of sites offering the information as to how to add and remove different Desktop Environments including the Kubuntu forum.

I've been a happy computer commander since date in signature though I would consider myself a noob still at GNULinux

/Jonas

[abear]

Re: Amazed by flexibility of Kubuntu

To add Ubuntu / Unity to Kubuntu, I used the following command:

sudo apt-get install ubuntu-desktop

To remove the Kubuntu / KDE from Ubuntu I used the following website:

http://www.psychocats.net/ubuntu/puregnome

Note: the command is very long, be sure you copy it all before pasting it into a terminal.

To add Kubuntu to Ubuntu I used the following command:

sudo apt-get install kubuntu-desktop

To remove Ubuntu from Kubuntu I used the following site:

http://www.psychocats.net/ubuntu/purekde

Note: After removing either of the above desktop environments please notice at the end of the removal process you will be given the autoremove command, I found it helpful to run this command to complete the removal process.

[SteveRiley]

Re: Amazed by flexibility of Kubuntu

autoremove deletes unused packages, but doesn't delete their configuration files. To remove those, run this:

sudo dpkg --purge `dpkg --get-selections | grep deinstall`

dpkg --grep-selections lists the install state of packages. "install" means exactly what you think it does. "deinstall" means the package has been removed but configuration files remain.

The command inside the single backquotes prunes the list to include only those packages in a "deinstall" state (if any). The output of that is fed into dpkg --purge. You'll see some errors: if no packages are in "deinstall" state, you'll see a simple error complaining about a missing argument. If some packages are in a "deinstall" state, their config files will be purged, and you'll also see some errors about dpkg not being able to remove a package called "deinstall." Nothing to worry about, just an artifact of the way the command is structuered.

There are more elegant ways to do this, but the above version is the quickest.

[sealbhach]

Re: Amazed by flexibility of Kubuntu

Ongoing, you can run

sudo apt-get --purge autoremove

which purges the config files along with the packages being removed.

.

[Snowhog]

Re: Amazed by flexibility of Kubuntu

Keep in mind that 'purging' only removes "system" configuration directories/files. Any configuration directories/files that were established in the user home directory are not touched - they remain.

Re-installing an application that had been used by the user and was purged will use these "user" configuration directories/files. If there was corruption or settings within these directories/files, they will be re-introduced. To avoid this, one must also remove any user configuration directories/files after purging the application.