When Regolith is installed via ISO, only the necessary desktop components or packages are installed by default. However when installing Regolith into an existing Ubuntu system, some desktop components that Regolith does not require will still be installed on the system. There is nothing wrong with keeping these additional packages, in fact they are important if you wish to switch back to the default Ubuntu session at some point, however some users prefer to remove them.

NOTE: Removing packages may cause unexpected behavior or loss of functionality.

Install LightDM #

The lightdm display manager can be installed by with a variety of themes, but we’ll install the package regolith-lightdm-config:

$ sudo apt install regolith-lightdm-config

Inspect the output of apt to verify you approve of the package changes. When presented with a menu, choosing between gdm3 and lightdm, select lightdm.

Remove Unneeded Packages #

Now that we are using the lightdm display manager, we can remove the unneeded packages:

$ sudo apt remove gdm3 gnome-shell evolution-data-server*

Inspect the output of apt to verify you approve of the package changes.

Now we can remove all of the dependencies of those packages:

$ sudo apt autoremove

Reboot #

At this point the unneeded dependencies have been removed from the system. Reboot to complete the procedure.

Undo #

If you decide that you’d like to restore the existing setup, run the following and select gdm3 as the display manager.

$ sudo apt install gdm3 gnome-shell evolution-data-server ubuntu-session
$ sudo apt remove regolith-lightdm-session