How to uninstall LibreOffice?

Which package should I remove to completely remove libreoffice? I have no need for office tools.

That's the one gripe I have with package managers like apt, there's no simple way to perform the essential task of removing unwanted software :S

Solution 1:

Type the following in terminal to remove libreoffice:

sudo apt-get remove --purge libreoffice*
sudo apt-get clean
sudo apt-get autoremove

Solution 2:

An especially thorough removal technique.

Suitable generally, but especially when removing LibreOffice to replace it with a manually installed LibreOffice or OpenOffice.

Assuming LibreOffice is provided by official Ubuntu packages on your system (which it generally is, unless you've installed it yourself from other packages or from the LibreOffice website), you can thoroughly remove it in the Terminal:

sudo apt-get remove fonts-opensymbol libreoffice libreoffice-\* openoffice.org-dtd-officedocument1.0 python\*-uno uno-libs3-\* ure ure-dbg

If you want to remove global configuration files too (this does not affect per-user configuration in users' home directories), replace remove with purge.

I think it's unlikely that removing any of this will break other programs, because Lubuntu doesn't come with LibreOffice, and Lubuntu users are able to run just about any Ubuntu program, without having to install LibreOffice.

Still, that is a legitimate concern and I cannot guarantee that nothing depends on your existing LibreOffice installation. Fortunately, the most serious breakages can be averted by making sure that nothing you need is removed with the LibreOffice packages. You can either be very careful while running the removal command (watch out for whatever else it says will be uninstalled), or simulate the removal first:

apt-get -s remove fonts-opensymbol libreoffice libreoffice-\* openoffice.org-dtd-officedocument1.0 python\*-uno uno-libs3-\* ure ure-dbg

(That is, put -s right after apt-get, and, optionally, remove the sudo.)

I haven't heard about any problems arising from removing fonts-opensymbol but those are fonts, and not enough people remove the package to know if problems viewing documents are common. So if the simulation reveals that a number of other packages you need or are unfamiliar with would be removed, try simulating without removing fonts-opensymbol and see what happens. And you might decide just not to remove that one at all.

The above technique uninstalls all LibreOffice packages provided in Ubuntu. I got the list of packages from here.

To shorten the command and avoiding having to type the name of every individual package, and also potentially to extend the life of this procedure in case differently named packages are provided in later versions of LibreOffice, I used the * wildcard to cover many packages at once. It is itself escaped with \ so that it won't be expanded by the shell into the name of some unrelated file or directory, before it is passed on to apt-get.

_{Related: How to replace LibreOffice with OpenOffice?}

Solution 3:

Here's another way I found (at libre-software.net):

To remove prior installations of LibreOffice:

sudo apt-get remove libreoffice-core

If you also want to remove LibO configuration files, use the purge switch:

sudo apt-get remove --purge libreoffice-core

So, by "main package", gemue2010 probably meant "libreoffice-core". The "clean" and "autoremove" arguments to apt-get that karthick87 provided are always a good idea.

While I appreciate the command-line (terminal) as much as the next enthusiast, I like having a GUI front-end alternative, a mouse-only solution to trivial matters. In this case, in Synaptic, you can mark the libreoffice-core package for complete removal, and it offers to remove the following additional (related/dependant) packages as well:

libreoffice-base libreoffice-base-core libreoffice-calc libreoffice-draw libreoffice-gnome libreoffice-gtk libreoffice-help-en-us libreoffice-impress libreoffice-math libreoffice-ogltrans libreoffice-pdfimport libreoffice-presentation-minimizer libreoffice-writer python3-uno

Disclaimer: I'm not a seasoned linux user, in fact I'm new to this world. I realize this method may not be satisfactory to some, and this answer may come too late to be of any use to the original asker, but I'm only sharing my findings in hopes they will be of use to others looking for something like this. So while this method might not remove all associated packages, some of which have been mentioned, it seems safer and good enough at removing most of the packages, to me, so maybe for others as well. Lastly, a note: in my case, mint-meta-xfce is also among the packages to be removed.

Solution 4:

As a corollary, you can use aptitude to search for which packages to uninstall:

aptitude search '~i' | grep libreoffice

which returns a list of all installed packages that contain the text 'libreoffice'. Grep is neat!

Then use apt-get to remove the main package that you have installed, and apt-get autoremove will remove all the smaller packages which are no longer necessary. Hope that piece of advice helps!

Solution 5:

In 16.04+ removing this is slightly easier. You only need to issue one slightly different command. I should add the old way still works as well if you like using it.

sudo apt purge "libreoffice*"