How To: Uninstall MATE and replace it with KDE in Sabayon 10

Here is a tip to uninstall MATE (desktop environment) and install the popular KDE.

We will assume that the user has to have installed the Sabayon version with environment MATE By default, it has been made under the previous version - X - of that distribution.

The version that we will uninstall from MATE, is the most recent, the 1.4.1

Reasons to install KDE and no other alternatives?

I will give my own opinion and based on the topics that I have to read online, etc.

Well first of all MATE is a fork of GNOME 2 for those users who still want to have the classic desktop environment as it was GNOME 2 at the time.

KDE, is to date the most complete desktop environment for both systems Linux as Unix, having an endless number of tools for each type of work of daily tasks such as office automation applications, programming or software development, messaging, security tools, Backups, partitioned, among other things.

Its high consumption of resources is due to the animations that it has, but we can adapt it to our tastes by configuring it ourselves in the panel provided by said desktop environment.

I decided to uninstall it not because I did not give it its credit, but because I still consider it green and it needs a lot to improve, I think alternatives like Cinnamon o XFCE They are gaining ground and are good competitors too, although they remember something and that is that everything is tailored and tasted by us as users.

Legends:

OF (Desktop environment o Desktop environment)

So let's get started:

Before removing the DE, we need to keep a few things in mind:

• Remove everything that is unusable in our system
• Be sure to have a Desktop Manager installed, be it GDM, LXDM o LightDM)

Preparation:

For this work, the best way to do this is to first install our DE, which in this case will be KDE.

In this tutorial, as we said above, we will replace MATE by KDE.

1. Open a terminal and log in as root user (of course, we can do this with Rigo)
2. Install your alternative DE (KDE)

# equo install kde-meta --ask

To do it by Rigo: enter: kde-meta In the search box, select the package and click install, or we install it immediately using a short shortcut: do:install kde-meta

1.Installing an alternative LoginManager: (As we chose KDE by default, we will use KDM... ;))

# equo install kdm

1. When we have finished with its installation, we must change KDM and make it our Login Manager by "default".

# nano -w  /etc/conf.d/xdm

And we replace:

DISPLAYMANAGER="lxdm"

PS: Valid also if we have GDM.

by

DISPLAYMANAGER="kdm"

When we're done, we log out, and log back into our newly installed DE.

PS: I better recommend restarting our PC, so it will have a better effect. 😉

Removing MATE

Ok, we are already logged into our KDE, true?

We do the following:

1. We open a terminal and access as "root".
2. Enter the following in our active terminal session:

equo query installated mate | xargs equo remove --nodeps

PS: Ignore the warnings:

without the "--nodeps", "sys-auth/pambase-20101024-r2" got pulled, and aborts the mission. Also, don't use the ""--deep" flag here

Postscript:

Before restarting our PC, we must reinstall the following: "sys-apps/dbus" and "x11-apps/scripts"

We do it in the following way:

equo install sys-apps/dbus xll-apps/scripts

And voila, this is the final step!

When we restart our PC, we will have a brand new KDE ready to use. ;)!

References:

Sabayon Wiki

User Group of Sabayon Linux on Facebook.

Regards!