Uninstall plank

Support & Help Requests
1

I would like to uninstall Plank.

Does anything else depend on it ?

2

You can use apt-cache to find this information:

[2997] [~] $ apt-cache rdepends plank
plank
Reverse Depends:
  plank-dbg
    plank:i386
  ubuntu-mate-desktop
    plank:i386
  ubuntu-mate-desktop
    plank:i386
  ubuntu-mate-desktop
    plank:i386

Or you can use Synaptic. Search for plank, then right click it and choose Properties. On the Dependencies tab you can pull down the dropbox to look for Dependents.

Screenshot at 2017-06-04 00-06-08.png807×609 63.3 KB

Unfortunately ubuntu-mate-desktop package depends on it. This is not always a sign you can't uninstall your child package. For one, some packages are simply just a central collection of other packages. That is exactly the case of ubuntu-mate-desktop if you read its description. For another you may not even have it installed. On my case, for instance, I don't have ubuntu-mate-desktop installed. If you also don't have it, you can safely uninstall plank.

One quick way to know this is to use the --installed command line argument, which looks only for reverse dependencies on the installed packages. Look at my output this time:

[2998] [~] $ apt-cache rdepends --installed plank
plank
Reverse Depends:
    plank:i386
    plank:i386
    plank:i386
    plank:i386

But because ubuntu-mate-desktop is actually just a container of related but not dependent packages and plank has no other dependents, you can safely uninstall plank even if ubuntu-mate-desktop is installed. It will be removed along with plank, but no other packages that ubuntu-mate-desktop installs will be removed with it.

I'll be writing a tutorial on checking dependencies here on the forums. It will include other options, including the useful aptitude and apt-rdepends applications. Thank you for giving me a good example to use on it.

5 Likes
3

Thanks. :slight_smile:

I will uninstall it.

4

Why do you need to uninstall it? Space limitations? Otherwise, I would just say, keep it but don’t run it and you’re fine.

5

I believe in uninstalling everything I do not use.

It probably makes my system a little faster and is one less thing that does not need to be updated.

6

It probably makes my system a little faster

Only if Plank was running before.

and is one less thing that does not need to be updated.

Valid point.

7

And you learn about dependancies, packages, libraries :wink:
(Getting to know all the packages of gnu/linux was/is a big learningcurve for me. Somehow I wanted to know what all those names were you see when you update.)