Completely remove XFCE without breaking system

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A few days back, I installed KDE plasma in dom0 following this guide, which turned out mostly successful. The actual desktop installed perfectly, but some applications (e.g. Dolphin) weren’t installed, and were seemingly replaced with their XFCE counterparts.

I’ve looked through reddit and some forum posts, and got advice on either what not to do or how to hide XFCE instead. I learned from the tutorial linked above that a simple dnf remove @kde-desktop-qubes will break my system if I were to uninstall KDE, for example, so I applied the same logic to XFCE. I also ruled out rebuilding an ISO because I already have quite a bit on my current installation.

I find XFCE not being uninstalled concerning mostly because of its RAM/storage use and them being together being aesthetically unpleasing.

So my questions are:

1a) Do any of the Qubes tools depend on XFCE for their GUIs?
2a) Will dnf remove in dom0 really brick my system?
2b) Is there some sort of dnf command I can use to remove XFCE from dom0, like how I could remove KDE plasma with dnf remove kdelibs plasma-workspace?
3) How can I get the KDE applications to replace the old XFCE ones (preferably without reinstalling)?

Thanks again, and sorry if I’m posting too much.

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Hello. Sounds good!
Hope you enjoy using Qubes as much as I do.
I will give some help towards question, I’m no expert by some standards, but seems like this is more a general Linux issue as I think you might have hoped. The following of what I write just comes from my experience. Correct me if I am wrong or anything of course.

Will running “dnf remove xx” break the system?
Well…
A) What do you consider a broken system?
B) What are you removing specifically?
All that matters really is knowing what you’re removing is. If you know how what you remove affects the system then you should be good.

In terms of removing XFCE… I think you are good doing this! Why not test it out, backup what you need if you can’t experiment with QubesOS on another system of course.

QubesOS is a system of itself, and XFCE is a Desktop Environment (DE) that uses X.

My current system just uses DWM which is just a window manager if you’re not already familiar. I use no XFCE at all in my system. But I still require the X (X.Org) window system. BTW, if you are concerned about keeping your system minimal, a window manager such as DWM, I3 etc (check out https://www.reddit.com/r/unixporn/) might be the way to go.

A window manager also has a smaller code base and does not come with applications as does a DE. This should in theory reduce the attack vector of your system as well. That is given that you make sure you source securely and sign what you download.

^ a bit of topic but might be helpful possibly, you might already know this but i don’t know, so there if you find useful.

If you do not care for having any XFCE tools then its all good, I haven’t checked, but maybe some QubesOS GUI requires XFCE?? Maybe somebody else could answer this for both of us. But my guess is that the QubesOS GUI stuff should work independently of XFCE and will just require the X system to present and running.

All qubes things can be done in the terminal, you dont need any gui for the system to function really, just like with any GNU/Linux, *NIX or BSD system.

I know you posted a while back and my answer is not the most concise (typing up quick!!!). But its here to be added to or/and viewed anyway.

I hope this helps!

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As of R4.2.1, you can perform dom0$ sudo dnf remove @xfce without serious consequence. I would note, however, that on the two machines I did this on, both had AwesomeWM installed, and one had the icons removed on the domains widget. But I have seen no other issues.

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