Optional desktop apps

Q&A
1

I’ve been following (to the best of my small ability) recent mailing list posts concerning making several apps that are installed with the desktop bundle optional/removable.

  • Is this anywhere near completion, or still very much a work in progress?
  • When it is complete, how will we remove unwanted packages? swupd bundle-remove?

My current installed CL version: 30820

I am particularly concerned about Evolution. Evolution may possibly be a better email client than Thunderbird, but I am not yet ready to learn my way around a new (for me) client. (And then there is the task of importing mail folders, account settings, etc.)

GUI email client/calendars take up enough space as it is on disk, but I recently noticed Evolution processes resident in my system memory. They do not seem to be doing anything except occupying precious memory space. Unless these processes are performing some useful function of which I am not aware, I would prefer to use the memory for something else. Short of suggesting I learn to use mixer (which would be hopelessly advanced for me), I wonder if someone here could please help me to streamline???

Thanks…

2

My understanding is that it will work as such:

Bundles will be modified to make some bundles optional dependencies via also-add Example. Note that this bundle change hasn’t landed so you can’t remove the also-add bundles from it.

Going with that example, when you install desktop-apps-extra, it will install all extra bundles from both include and also-add. After installation, you will be able to remove also-add bundles from your system without removing desktop-apps-extra bundle (provided it isn’t an include of another bundle). Currently you are unable to remove include bundles without first removing the bundle (or bundles) that add them.

The benefits of also-add won’t be seen until the bundles are modified to make some bundles optional, which will take time. Over time bundles are becoming more refined, so while not there yet, in future you will have a lot more customization over what gets installed.

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3

We just introduced the first few optional bundles earlier this week. It will take a while before we go through all of clr-bundles and do this on a more consistent and larger scale. Also, for the desktop specifically, @mesiment needs to do this :slight_smile:

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