How to upgrade in place from 16.10 unity to 17.04 gnome

[Brian Burch]

On 17/04/17 18:10, Pander wrote:
> To remove Unity, I simply use dpkg -P packagenames. When that list becomes long from many dependencies, I put the output of that through grep to get all the depending packages and cat those to a file. Edit the file (vim and a lot of Shift-j) and put dpkg -P at the beginning. I use the same trick for ouput of dpkg -l|grep -v ^ii
>
> Of course, check if those lists of package names are okay to purge before doing bulk purges. Some packages are tricky, see my post a while back on Unity dependencies.

Thanks for your suggestion, Pander. I did something fairly similar to 
that in the past. If I decide to go ahead this time, then I will follow 
your plan because it seems simpler than what I did before.

However, I was hoping to receive advice that would be attractive and 
useful to people who are not as confident as us with these low-level tools.

Am I correct in thinking the "old method" of installing gnome-desktop 
alongside unity has become too complex to be worth trying?

I tried "sudo dpkg --purge --dry-run unity" (-P is the same as --purge) 
on my xenial system "just for fun", but it bombed out with a "too many 
dependencies" error. However, it didn't list ANY of them!

I turned on --debug=400 and saw a partial list, but couldn't get "2>&1" 
redirection to work properly under sudo.

"dpkg -l | grep -i unity" gives a long list of packages... do you 
recommend any of them as a starting point to drag down the whole tree in 
a few big sections, or should I stuff them all into a purge packages file?

Perhaps I should just wait for the next ubuntu release and hope there 
will be a more straightforward conversion path?

Regards,

Brian