Hello,


I normally install a desktop environment with tasksel, as it installs at configures most programs that are to be expected in a user-friendly
desktop environment:

* login manager
* power management
* network manager

and so on and so on.

I do not know most programs that are needed in order to have such
experience, and I do not necessarily want to.
Those programs are different between desktop environment (lxde, kde,
mate, ...) and might change even between versions.

The only issue I have with tasksel, is that sometimes I wish a more
minimal environment.
In most cases, is I would prefer it would not install some programs like libreoffice, media player, browser and mail client.

I often use firefox/thunderbird as mail client, and vlc as media player
and tasksel might install others.

I could remove those packages afterwards or just set those I like as
default, but it is suboptimal as they are still downloaded and
installed, and if not removed will take space and bandwidth during updates.
I would prefer not even installing them.


I could not use tasksel and install only what I want, but then I have to learn/verify all programs that are required for a functional environment.


Is there any way to use tasksel, but also exclude a list of programs
from installing?
At the end of the day, I want to avoid a small subset or programs that
should not affect the functionality of the desktop (KDE should not stop
working if firefox is the default browser intsead of konqueror) and that
take a lot of space (I think libreoffice+dependencies is the biggest
package in the lxqt environment)

As everyone has different needs, I think that different tasksel targets
for more minimal desktops experience are not worth.
Now I'm complaining about four or five programs that are too much for my
needs, but surely there is ton of stuff that I do not care, but other
might not want on their systems.

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Federico Kircheis wrote:

I could not use tasksel and install only what I want, but then I have to learn/verify all programs that are required for a functional environment.

Don't use a tasksel desktop.

Install one of these metapackages for KDE:

kde-full/stable 5:142 amd64
complete KDE Software Compilation for end users

kde-plasma-desktop/stable 5:142 amd64
KDE Plasma Desktop and minimal set of applications

kde-standard/stable 5:142 amd64
KDE Plasma Desktop and standard set of applications

Or xfce4 to get a working XFCE environment.

There doesn't seem to be a similar metapackage for GNOME, but
perhaps I just missed it.

Any of these should get you to a point where everything is
working.

-dsr-

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On 6/30/25 8:46 AM, Dan Ritter wrote:

Federico Kircheis wrote:

I could not use tasksel and install only what I want, but then I have to
learn/verify all programs that are required for a functional environment.

Don't use a tasksel desktop.

Install one of these metapackages for KDE:

kde-full/stable 5:142 amd64
complete KDE Software Compilation for end users

kde-plasma-desktop/stable 5:142 amd64
KDE Plasma Desktop and minimal set of applications

kde-standard/stable 5:142 amd64
KDE Plasma Desktop and standard set of applications

Or xfce4 to get a working XFCE environment.

There doesn't seem to be a similar metapackage for GNOME, but
perhaps I just missed it.

Any of these should get you to a point where everything is
working.

-dsr-

Does any of this apply to the MATE desktop? TIA

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The only issue I have with tasksel, is that sometimes I wish a more
minimal environment.

Then don't use tasksel to install package(s).

One can, however, use tasksel to list its tasks,
and from those, the corresponding package(s),
and in turn, from those, the dependencies and recommends thereof.

E.g.:
$ tasksel --list-tasks
u desktop Debian desktop environment
u gnome-desktop GNOME
u xfce-desktop Xfce
u gnome-flashback-desktop GNOME Flashback
u kde-desktop KDE Plasma
u cinnamon-desktop Cinnamon
u mate-desktop MATE
u lxde-desktop LXDE
u lxqt-desktop LXQt
u web-server web server
u ssh-server SSH server
u laptop laptop
$ tasksel --task-packages desktop
task-desktop
$ apt-cache show task-desktop | grep -E '^(Depends|Recommends):'
Depends: tasksel (= 3.73), xorg, xserver-xorg-video-all, xserver-xorg-input-all, desktop-base
Recommends: task-gnome-desktop | task-xfce-desktop | task-kde-desktop
| task-lxde-desktop | task-gnome-flashback-desktop |
task-cinnamon-desktop | task-mate-desktop | task-lxqt-desktop,
xdg-utils, fonts-symbola, avahi-daemon, libnss-mdns, anacron, eject,
iw, alsa-utils, sudo, firefox | firefox-esr, cups
$
And one can continue to drill down to determine just what package(s)
one wants to install,
and of course the APT system will also handle dependencies thereof. So, e.g.: $ apt-cache show task-gnome-desktop | grep -E '^(Depends|Recommends):'
Depends: tasksel (= 3.73), task-desktop, gnome-core
Recommends: gnome, synaptic, libreoffice-gnome, libreoffice-writer, libreoffice-calc, libreoffice-impress, libreoffice-help-en-us,
mythes-en-us, hunspell-en-us, hyphen-en-us, network-manager-gnome
$
So, in such case, one might just want to install, e.g. gnome-core

And most users, when installing, generally don't want to be
overwhelmed with excessive choices,
and when choosing to install a desktop environment, generally expect
it will be quite complete and
cover all they expect and will likely find they want associated with
that, and not have to be hunting down
additional package to install to give them a (relatively) complete
desktop environment. For those that want
less, they can install more specifically/limited, as I suggested. And
if the default were much more minimal on
the tasksel selection, there'd be lots of complaints about "missing"
stuff they didn't get that they expected
to be installed and working with their desktop environment selection
from tasksel. And if tasksel gave lots
more options at installation time, plenty of folks would complain about that.

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On 30/06/2025 7:11 pm, Michael Paoli wrote:

The only issue I have with tasksel, is that sometimes I wish a more
minimal environment.

Then don't use tasksel to install package(s).

Yes, this is what I am doing, but then I need to manually track all
packages installed by tasksel, and list all those I'm interested in.

And often I do not know which one I'm interested one, but I know those I
do not want.

And this also holds for metapackages like lxqt.
It still installs a lot of things, so down to lxqt-core.
It still installs some things I've noticed and to not want, so I need to inspect which packages are installed, transitive dependencies included..

I hoped it would have been possible to exlucde dependencies, for examle
by prefixing them with "-"; for example:

apt install lxqt -meteo-qt

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Federico Kircheis wrote:

On 30/06/2025 7:11 pm, Michael Paoli wrote:
And this also holds for metapackages like lxqt.
It still installs a lot of things, so down to lxqt-core.
It still installs some things I've noticed and to not want, so I need to inspect which packages are installed, transitive dependencies included..

I hoped it would have been possible to exlucde dependencies, for examle by prefixing them with "-"; for example:

apt install lxqt -meteo-qt

You can postfix "-" to get that behavior.

apt install lxqt meteo-qt-

Also, do you know that the -s switch to apt install will tell
you the whole plan without retrieving or installing the packages?

-dsr-

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On 03/07/2025 5:28 pm, Dan Ritter wrote:

Federico Kircheis wrote:

On 30/06/2025 7:11 pm, Michael Paoli wrote:
And this also holds for metapackages like lxqt.
It still installs a lot of things, so down to lxqt-core.
It still installs some things I've noticed and to not want, so I need to
inspect which packages are installed, transitive dependencies included..

I hoped it would have been possible to exclude dependencies, for example by >> prefixing them with "-"; for example:

apt install lxqt -meteo-qt

You can postfix "-" to get that behavior.

apt install lxqt meteo-qt-

Oh; i was not aware of that, is it specific for apt?
man apt does not seem to mention it.
I'll try it out.

Also, do you know that the -s switch to apt install will tell
you the whole plan without retrieving or installing the packages?

But if I list all packages, then remove all those that I obviously do
not need, and write a script that install only those, it might "break"
when some packages are updated or new dependencies are added.
With the blacklist approach, I expected it would break only if the
package is now required.


On 03/07/2025 5:51 pm, Greg wrote:

I'm only aware of '--no-install-recommends' as far as apt goes.

Yes, but it has the same issue.
Now many things are missing, and I need to search them out, and
dependencies might change between package releases.

Of course, with a 100 terabyte hard disk, it can seem rather silly.

* my drives are nowhere that big, but if someone will pay for a
replacement, no offense taken, although on some devices it is not that
easy to replace them

* downloading and uploading unnecessary data not only takes space on
my drive, but also takes more time and unnecessarily consumes my traffic
plan. I'm not necessarily talking about the .deb file by itself, but
also docker images, iso files, virtual machines, and so on, which are
built on top of installed deb packages.

* a system with more dependencies has a higher chance to break than a
system with less dependencies when upgrading components

* offsite backups take longer, as verifying they integrity and restore process


And I'm sure I can find other reason why avoiding some unnecessary
dependencies has positive side-effects

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On Thu, Jul 03, 2025 at 18:15:42 +0200, Federico Kircheis wrote:

Oh; i was not aware of that, is it specific for apt?
man apt does not seem to mention it.
I'll try it out.

Mine says:

install, reinstall, remove, purge (apt-get(8))
Performs the requested action on one or more packages specified via
regex(7), glob(7) or exact match. The requested action can be
overridden for specific packages by appending a plus (+) to the
package name to install this package or a minus (-) to remove it.

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On 04/07/2025 5:56 am, David Wright wrote:

On Thu 03 Jul 2025 at 18:15:42 (+0200), Federico Kircheis wrote:

On 03/07/2025 5:28 pm, Dan Ritter wrote:

Federico Kircheis wrote:

And this also holds for metapackages like lxqt.
It still installs a lot of things, so down to lxqt-core.
It still installs some things I've noticed and to not want, so I need to >>>> inspect which packages are installed, transitive dependencies included.. >>>>
I hoped it would have been possible to exclude dependencies, for example by
prefixing them with "-"; for example:

No, you don't want to exclude dependencies; doing that will break
packages. That's why they're call dependencies: the package depends
on them being installed.

"apt install lxqt -meteo-qt"

meteo-qt is not a dependency: it's only recommended.

Isn't a recommended package a dependency?

On 03/07/2025 5:51 pm, Greg wrote:

I'm only aware of '--no-install-recommends' as far as apt goes.

Yes, but it has the same issue.
Now many things are missing, and I need to search them out, and
dependencies might change between package releases.

Except that it reverses the logic: --no-install-recommends will
install the packages you ask for, but with minimal extra packages.

When you find that some expected functionality is absent, you
install the package that gives you that functionality, again

Yes, but I do not know which package provides the missing functionality.
For example, with --no-install-recommends, icons are not shown correctly
and trash does not work.

Those are two things I've immediately noticed.
I can track down the relevant packages (it takes time) but how many
other things might I have missed?

And that's just because I did not want some extra functionality I know I
do not want.

Excluding two or three packages is much easier, and the suggested
approach of appending a - works perfectly if the package was not installed.


The amount of time required to install a desktop environment from
scratch with "--no-install-recommends" (including testing that
everything works correctly) is not worth the space/resources I am going
to save.
The more practical approach to install the desktop environment as
recommended, minus some packages I know I do not need, costs only a
fraction of time.
Yes, I might still have some packages I do not need (without me knowing
it), but hopefully the amount of space it takes is negligible for my
use-cases.

with --no-install-recommends to keep your system minimal.

"Now many things are missing":

Well, you can hardly expect the Debian or the DE developers to guess
which functions happen to be the ones that you want.

"and I need to search them out":

Hardly onerous: the package names are likely to be in the Recommends
list of the top-level package you installed.

Might be the case for many command-line tools and most applications,
with the desktop environment my experience differs, even when looking at lxqt-core.

But if I list all packages, then remove all those that I obviously do
not need, and write a script that install only those, it might "break"
when some packages are updated or new dependencies are added.
With the blacklist approach, I expected it would break only if the
package is now required.

If your "blacklist" system causes breakages, then you can hardly
expect Debian developers to give it any consideration at all.

If the script breaks it's a good thing, and obviously it's up to me to
fix it.
I am not expecting Debian developers to give it any consideration.

With the whitelist I install all the packages, some are not even needed anymore, and then some functionality might still be missing.

* downloading and uploading unnecessary data not only takes space on
my drive, but also takes more time and unnecessarily consumes my
traffic plan.

* offsite backups take longer, as verifying they integrity and
restore process

Those are reasons why --no-install-recommends was provided in the
first place.

I'm not necessarily talking about the .deb file by
itself, but also docker images, iso files, virtual machines, and so
on, which are built on top of installed deb packages.

That's a separate concern, and in your hands.

Which is why I do not think that big drives are a good argument, not
sure if we disagree here.

* a system with more dependencies has a higher chance to break than a
system with less dependencies when upgrading components

And I'm sure I can find other reason why avoiding some unnecessary
dependencies has positive side-effects

Again, you're confusing the issue by using the wrong terminology.
APT makes sure that dependencies are satisfied. If an extra dependency
is added (rare), it gets installed.¹ If an extra Recommends is added,
you might not even notice the fact when --no-install-recommends is in
force: and if it were to be undesirable, you wouldn't have to do
anything about eliminating it, like blacklisting it.

¹ apt-get users might require dist-upgrade or --with-new-pkgs when
this happens.

Cheers,
David.

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On Fri, Jul 04, 2025 at 07:04:32AM +0200, Federico Kircheis wrote:

[...]

Isn't a recommended package a dependency?

That... depends :-)

In the strict Debian sense, there is "depends": your package won't
work if that dependency is not installed. "Recommends": your package
might be missing some interesting functionality, but will work,
in general.

One example:

tomas@caliban:~$ apt show xpdf
Package: xpdf
Version: 3.04+git20220601-1+b2
[...]
Depends: libc6 (>= 2.34), libgcc-s1 (>= 3.0), libpaper1, libpoppler126 (>= 22.12.0), libstdc++6 (>= 11), libx11-6, libxm4 (>= 2.3.4), libxt6
Recommends: poppler-utils, poppler-data, gsfonts-x11, cups-bsd, sensible-utils

If libc6 isn't there, the xpdf binary won't even start. If it has a
version less than 2.34, it might start, but might do funny things.

OTOH, if you don't have poppler-utils, xpdf will work fine, but you
might miss some nice things to play with PDFs.

(Life, being what it is, gives us a grey area between "doesn't work
at all" and "reduced functionality" -- where'd be the fun otherwise?)

FWIW, I like a minimal system, so I have in /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/95no-recommends

APT::Install-Recommends no;

This puts the burden on me to look at the Recommends section in packages
I install and decide on a case-by-case basis.

Cheers
--
t

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On 04/07/2025 5:32 pm, David Wright wrote:

On Fri 04 Jul 2025 at 07:04:32 (+0200), Federico Kircheis wrote:

Excluding two or three packages is much easier, and the suggested
approach of appending a - works perfectly if the package was not
installed.

In which case, I think you should install the equivs package (it's
in every suite) and use it to build your own packages called
libreoffice, etc.

But wouldn't it break if I want to install libreoffice at a later point?

You still need to use one of -s, --simulate, --just-print, --dry-run, --recon, --no-act, in order to see just which package equivalents you
need to build.

Then, in future, you install all your equivalents before you install
the DE itself, and APT/dpkg will see that those _recommendations_ are
already installed. But repeat the -s run after installing your first
set of equivalents in case there are any second-order recommendations.

Cheers,
David.

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Federico Kircheis wrote:

On 04/07/2025 5:32 pm, David Wright wrote:

On Fri 04 Jul 2025 at 07:04:32 (+0200), Federico Kircheis wrote:

Excluding two or three packages is much easier, and the suggested approach of appending a - works perfectly if the package was not installed.

In which case, I think you should install the equivs package (it's
in every suite) and use it to build your own packages called
libreoffice, etc.

But wouldn't it break if I want to install libreoffice at a later point?

Yes, you would need to uninstall it first.

If you want a system which can support multiple versions of a
package simultaneously, you will need to look at things like
Lix, and you will need to do even more work.

The point of a Linux distribution is to make things easy to
install software in a way that makes sense to the distribution's
people. If you don't like the way Debian does it, there are many
other distributions, and you can even create your own.

The best thing about a Linux distribution is that you gain a
community of people who know how to do things in the ways that
the distribution encourages. You have to rebuild that if you go
your own way.

-dsr-

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