Uninstalling Deepin DE from Ubuntu

I'm currently running Ubuntu GNOME 17.04 on my laptop, and things have been pretty smooth. Today, I felt kinda bored, and so I thought I'd try out the Deepin Desktop Environment. I followed the instructions from another question on this website. The instructions were to type the following commands in Terminal:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:leaeasy/dde sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install dde

Once that finished, I rebooted and saw the login screen for Deepin. I logged in, and went around all the features. But after a while, I got bored and wanted to switch back to GNOME. I logged out, and logged into GNOME. I opened Terminal, and typed the following command: (NOTE: All the deepin apps were available in my GNOME session, and would work. Although, I'd get an error report after I'd close them. And the Deepin Terminal was set as my default terminal.).

sudo apt purge dde ; sudo apt autoremove

I thought the job was done. But after I rebooted, I still got the Deepin login screen (My default was LightDM with the Unity Greeter). I selected GNOME from the list of DEs. But after logging into GNOME, I saw that the Deepin Terminal was still there (And set as the default terminal). I tried running my previous commands again, but it said that the package dde wasn't found. Now if I try logging into Deepin, it logs in, but the screen is void of anything except for the wallpaper. What do I do? I haven't found a solution for this anywhere online.

Solution 1:

PPA-Purge was designed as a bash shell script capable of automatically downgrading all packages in a given PPA back to the Ubuntu versions.

It can be used here to uninstall or downgrade everything previously installed by dde from its own repository.

If not installed already it can be easily installed with sudo apt install ppa-purge. Then run it against the PPA:

sudo ppa-purge ppa:leaeasy/dde

Obs.: There's no guarantee that everything will be as before because some settings might have been changed. Usually the purge also removes settings but not always. A Desktop Environment is complex, with hundreds or thousands of different packages carefully knitted together, making it really hard to completely remove it once installed.

Solution 2:

I had the same problem with KDE. so at the end what i did was , i install synaptic package manager by typing

sudo apt-get install synaptic

then open synaptic and search deepin . now you will find all the deepin packages that are in your system. mark them all for removal and finally remove them.

Solution 3:

Based on the above, to complete uninstall and remove deepin desktop environment (dde), I did the following in the Terminal:

1. Uninstalling desktop environment:

   sudo apt remove dde
   sudo apt auto-remove dde
   sudo add-apt-repository ppa:leaeasy/dde -r -y
   

2. Removing remaining installed packages:

   To view installed dde remaining packages, please type or copy the following:

   apt list --installed | grep dde 
   

   To remove all dde packages:

   sudo apt remove --purge '^dde.*'
   

   Type Y (Yes)

   To view installed deepin remaining packages, please type or copy the following:

   apt list --installed | grep deepin 
   

   To remove all deeping packages:

   sudo apt remove --purge '^deepin.*'
   

   Type Y (Yes)

3. Autoremove

   sudo apt autoremove
   

4. Reboot your computer In the Terminal, type Reboot and you will see that dde is not longer in your login window.