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I am preparing a PC that will be used by a lot of people in the company I work for to access information on our local network through a specific software. The PC will have a Debian 9.3 with Gnome 3 installed. I am trying to shrink as possible the number of software installed, so people do not try to tinker with the system. I understand that a desktop environment is comprised by a lot of individual components devoted to specific tasks, like explained here. I would like to better understand what are the components that are loaded when the graphical environment is built, so I can remove what is not really necessary, and I thought that analysing the script responsible for bringing it up could help me. What is in Debian 9.3 the script I am looking for?

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As mentioned earlier apt, apt-get, aptitude, and even dpkg can be used to manage installations of software packages on Debian systems. You will most likely use apt or apt-get to install GNOME. Here is a guide on a minimal install of GNOME on Debian. They happen to show a list of all packages associated with and needed to get a functional GNOME desktop running.

Are you using a netinstall image of Debian? Starting there can help make your Debian instance have as few packages as possible. Alternatively you can prune any packages you find unnecessary as long as you pay attention to the output of apt or apt-get and are not removing any of the core components of GNOME.

I suggest to start with a with a netinstall, then run aptitude install –without-recommends gdm3 some people report that it is all that is needed to get a working GNOME desktop.

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  • Yes, I have been using the netsinstall image. I did not try the gdm3 thing as I am going to use lightdm. Actually I was following the same guide: it is a good starting point, but I had to spend half a day adding and removing packages to fine tune the PC
    – Giorgio R
    Commented Feb 23, 2018 at 16:09
  • I would recommend you create your golden Debian GNOME image that is set up the way you need it and deploy that however you see fit then. GNOME is a very feature rich Desktop environment so really only you can say what you need or do not need installed.
    – kemotep
    Commented Feb 23, 2018 at 16:59
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Debian use the apt mechanisme to install packages and resolve dependencies. According to their wiki, there are 4 packages available to install gnome :

  1. task-gnome-desktop : the "Debian's selection of applications (This is what is installed on a freshly installed system. It includes some applications that do not really integrate with GNOME, like LibreOffice and Iceweasel)"
  2. gnome : "The full GNOME environment, including applications that are not officially part of the Upstream GNOME releases. It provides the recommended GNOME environment for Debian."
  3. gnome-desktop-environment : "The official upstream GNOME environment, minus a few packages. It is the closest to upstream recommendations."
  4. gnome-core "Only the official “core” modules of the GNOME desktop. Above packages depend on this one." To install a minimum, gnome-core is the best choice :

# apt install gnome-core

To know dependecies involved with each package, apt-rdepends should do the trick.

# apt install apt-rdepends
# apt-rdepends gnome-core
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  • Unfortunately gnome-core, even if with --no-install-recommends, includes a lot of thing I do not want to have for instance firefox
    – Giorgio R
    Commented Feb 23, 2018 at 12:09

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