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I am not yet fully versed with the components installed by default on my machine, so I will apologize in advance if my question is silly. This screenshot shows that a lot many of (what I assume are) KDE components (libk*, kde*, etc.) are being installed/updated on my machine. That is just the output from sudo apt-fast update && sudo apt-fast dist-upgrade -y from a few minutes ago.

  1. Can anyone tell me why?
  2. Can I safely remove them? If yes, how?

Thanks in advance for any replies.

System specs: Fully updated Ubuntu 12.04 x86_64 w/kernel3.4, Gnome, Unity, Core2Duo, 4GB

ish
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Dune
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3 Answers3

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You probably installed a KDE app at some time in the past, which needed to pull in those libraries to run.

The KDE apps would be shown in either synaptic or the Software Center, and if you're not careful, you could easily install one without realizing it.

Edit: How to remove KDE components

I don't know if there is one command that will work, but according to this topic, you may be able to run sudo apt-get remove kdebase-bin.

Also, in synaptic, you can search all installed packages and filter on "KDE" to get a list of any installed packages that mention KDE, but it would need to be checked to make sure it's not just a Gnome program that says something such as "like the KDE program", for example. But it's a graphical way to see and select installed KDE components.

There are also long commandlines that can be copied and pasted to delete everything KDE, such as the ones on this site.

Community
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Marty Fried
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You should first figure out what is pulling those packages in. You can do so from the command line for each of the packages. Giving one example:

apt-cache rdepends kdoctools

should list all packages requiring the kdoctool package ("rdepends" = "reverse depends"), but regardless whether they are installed or not. So for each "reverse dependency" listed, you can then check whether it is installed, using dpkg:

dpkg -l <packagename>

If dpkg cannot find that packagename, it never has been installed. If the output line starts with "ii", the package is installed (and you should not remove kdoctools in this example). In all other cases, the package is not installed either ("un" e.g. means "uninstalled").

You could also check with apt-get's autoremove parameter, e.g.

apt-get autoremove --purge

This would try to remove dependencies which were once pulled in but are no longer needed, and purge relevant configuration files (you can ommit the --purge if you're afraid of that part).

Izzy
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Most likely you did install some package that needs this KDE packages.

You can remove them but carefully look on what gets removed due to the dependencies.

Florian Diesch
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