How to remove nautilus without screwing up unity?

I recently installed Cinnamon on my Ubuntu 12.04.1 and I loved the interface of its file manager Nemo, which I guess is also based on Nautilus. But I prefer Nemo over Nautilus and I want to remove Nautilus completely and have Nemo as my defaut File Manager.

The problem however is that removing Nautilus requires me to remove ubuntu-desktop too. Is it possible somehow to retain Ubuntu Desktop and remove Nautilus?

Solution 1:

You don't need to remove Nautilus - just set Nemo as default - see here.

To install Nemo, open a terminal.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:webupd8team/nemo
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install nemo nemo-filerolle

If you need to install extensions for Nemo (optional)

sudo apt-get install nemo-compare nemo-dropbox nemo-media-columns nemo-pastebin nemo-seahorse nemo-share

To use Nemo as default File Manager, you will need dconf-tools

sudo apt-get install dconf-tools

To disable Nautilus from drawing the desktop item,

gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.background show-desktop-icons false

To Set Nemo as the default file manager (replacing Nautilus),

xdg-mime default nemo.desktop inode/directory application/x-gnome-saved-search

If you have removed unity, you should be able to reinstall it.

Start your computer and login & open a terminal.

If you can't login, enter the tty with Ctrl+Alt+F2.

Then run:

sudo apt-get install unity-2d
sudo apt-get install ubuntu-desktop
sudo apt-get install ubuntu-desktop-2d
sudo apt-get install compizconfig-settings-manager
sudo apt-get install xserver-xgl
sudo apt-get install emerald
sudo apt-get install compiz-fusion-plugins-extra
sudo apt-get install git compiz-plugins-extra
sudo apt-get install compiz-plugins-extra
sudo apt-get install unity

Then reboot - if in the tty just run:

sudo shutdown -r now

Solution 2:

ubuntu-desktop is a package that doesn't contain any files but just depends on other packages (that's called a "metapackage"). Unity will still work if you remove this package.