[ubuntu-uk] Help gnome 3 broke my laptop!

[George Tripp]

> From: Pete <psmouty at live.com>

>To: ubuntu-uk at lists.ubuntu.com 
>Sent: Sunday, 20 November 2011, 20:05
>Subject: [ubuntu-uk] Help gnome 3 broke my laptop!
> 
>hi all,
>
>I was playing around trying to install gnome 3 onto my Ubuntu 11.04 system, this was done via synaptic, since then I have been given the choice of 'gnome classic, KDE (plasma workspace), Arios (my original system based on Ubuntu), recovery console, unity 2d, user defined session' at login but none of them are my original desktop session and most give the error 'unable to load session' with the option to logout.
>
>I have since got the KDE desktop working to write this post.
>
>I have 'completely removed' gnome 3 in synaptic but it only removed 1 package not the 139 it installed when I installed it!
>
>My question(s) are
>
>1/ most important how do I recover my original desktop session?
>2/ why did it install the KDE desktop environment without me even trying?
>3/ is there a way of listing the packages installed on a certain date/time to ensure I can manually remove them with the hope of restoring my system to it's previous state?
>
>thanks in advance (and no I will not be trying to install extra desktops on an existing system again, I will dual boot in future!!)
>
>regards
>
>Pete
>
>
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>https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-uk
>https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UKTeam/


Strangely enough I've been trying different desktops as I find Unity still seems to create problems for me. (Sorry!) The thing is when you select a particular desktop in Synaptic it includes loads of other stuff including apps for that particular desktop to make it work. Presumably it then doesn't know which packages you need for other so won't delete anything other than the "desktop package" itself.

If you really need to get back to where you started probably the surest way is to save your data to another device and reinstall.

Probably not what you to hear.

Maybe someone else has got a better idea.

George