VDQ desktop

[Toby Kelsey]

Beartooth wrote:
> I recently installed Ubuntu 5.10, and then started to remove things I knew
> I wouldn't ever use -- such as games, and chat, and OpenOffice. (I don't
> do the first two; AbiWord is plenty for what little word processing I do,
> and a lot faster.)
> 
> It wouldn't let me remove some of them, or else warned me, that IF I
> removed them, I would also lose the ubuntu desktop. I'm very surprised,
> because RH/FC (which ubuntu resembles quite a bit, despite its debianity)
> have never made any difficulty.

This is a case of a misleading name. ubuntu-desktop is a meta-package which is
used to ensure a group of software packages can be installed together but
uninstalling it will not remove any extra software - you will still have your
Ubuntu desktop.

The description in aptitude or synaptic says:

 It is safe to remove this package if some of the desktop system packages are
not desired.  However, it is recommended that you keep it installed, because it
is used to carry out certain upgrade
 transitions (such as adding new packages to the system).

> I don't find these questions on this forum, not in the beginner's guide;
> my apologies if I've just missed them somehow.

Not your fault. The website doesn't make it easy to find relevant documentation,
but <https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MetaPackages> says "their job is depending on other
packages to be installed".  If you're psychic and also know the details of how
apt-get works, you just might be able to figure out this means you can uninstall
it safely.

Toby