The KDE mess

How KDE infactuation messed my desktop

After much adieu and drool about MINT KDE15, I was tempted to try KDE desktop and installed it
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:kubuntu-ppa/backports
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install kubuntu-desktop
sudo apt-get upgrade && sudo did apt-get update

KDE did comeup well, but my Cinnamon, GNOME and Mint got totally messed up. This meant that the default display manager became kdm and all other display managers - gdm, mdm, lightdm were messed up by something that happened during the installation. All attempts to fix it did not help. The only choice I thought I was left with was to reinstall the OS. But then I have done that so many times in the past, I was not excited anymore to do that. Instead I thought how about removing KDE-Desktop and get back to how things were before. Well, its's much easily said than done. Here's what I did to start with

sudo service lightdm start

Tried to manually start lightdm. That did not help a bit. It was an endless wait.

After much adieu and drool about MINT KDE15, I was tempted to try kde desktop and installed it
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:kubuntu-ppa/backports
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install kubuntu-desktop
sudo apt-get upgrade && sudo apt-get update

KDE did comeup well, but my Cinnamon, GNOME and Mint got totally messed up. This meant that the default display manager became kdm and all other display managers - gdm, mdm, lightdm were messed up by something that happened during the installation. All attempts to fix it did not help. The only choice I thought I was left with was to reinstall the OS. But then I have done that so many times in the past, I was not excited anymore to do that. Instead I thought how about removing KDE-Desktop and get back to how things were before. Well, its's much easily said than done. Here's what I did to start with

sudo service lightdm start

Tried to manually start lightdm. That did not help a bit. It was an endless wait.

Opened the file /etc/x11/default-display-manager and manually det the default display manager to gdm

All hell cut loose and the system won't show me even the login screen now. After a ,couple of re-start, even KDM would not start. Now this was the worst point and I was totally struck. So I logged in to the command prompt mode and wanted to reconfigure lightdm and here's what I did

sudo dpkg-reconfigure lightdm
sudo apt-get upgrade && sudo apt-get update

That did help a bit. Now I was able to login to a default session and things started to get better, but still my gdm and mdm were not working. So I decided to totally remove gdm, mdm, kdm and reinstall what I wanted

sudo gnome-session quit #logout from the current session
sudo apt-get purge gdm
sudo reboot

sudo apt-get --purge remove kubuntu-desktop
sudo apt-get autoremove
sudo apt-get install gdm
sudo apt-get upgrade && sudo apt-get update
sudo dpkg-reconfigure gdm

Nope, this also did not help. The only choice I had was to manually remove every kdm package

#Remove all KDE and QT packages individually
sudo apt-get remove $(dpkg --get-selections | grep kde | awk '{ print $1 }')
sudo apt-get remove $(dpkg --get-selections | grep qt | awk '{ print $1 }')
# Remove the bin, if it was left hanging around
sudo apt-get remove kdebase-bin
# make sure you root the entire family out
sudo apt-get autoremove

sudo reboot

Now you are safe and finally, back to sane world. Hope this helps you guys too