How do I extricate myself from horribly broken Gnome 3?

[don quixada]

Ok, after three months, I'm fed up with trying to get Gnome 3 working properly. I have no problems with the interface like others do, but I can't seem to get it to work properly and I'm getting tired of using a broken GUI. I want to downgrade to Gnome 2 or try something else completely such as xfce. Can anyone help me do this? I tried to delete the corresponding package.acceptkeywords and related files that allowed me to install Gnome 3 in the first place but it doesn't seem to work. Any tips?

Alternatively, I tried to upgrade Gnome 3.6 to 3.8 but it there seemed to be systemd issues and I couldn't figure out how to resolve them. Would 3.8 fix some of the brokenness (such as gnome-control-center not working)?

dq

[vaxbrat]

Some of the base packages will stick around as shards because other stuff will be dependent on them. That includes other desktops like kde in my case. The following is from a system where I had been keeping a gnome install going for years even though I've been with kde since the beginning as well. I did this, because at one point back in early kde (might have been early 3.x), I could not get kde to start up.

When gnome3 started breaking ebuilds all over, I chopped off the head by setting -gnome in ufed and did a world update. Then I used

[don quixada]

I tried to put -gnome in make.conf and do an 'emerge -N world' but libre-office (the first item) wouldn't build due to the gnome requirement. Is there a way to separate the gnome libraries from the gnome applications?

dq

[Featherfoot]

No help with your question, but this is a great idea!

I am so sick of conflicting dependencies in gnome making my emerges not work...

[vaxbrat]

Not sure why emerge is balking on you since I'm pretty sure 4.04.2 built fine without gnome. However on ~amd64 the latest (4.1.0.2) bombs out during the build somewhere on me

[don quixada]

Maybe because you have kde? I don't have that installed and was planning on using xcfe but there doesn't seem to be an xcfe flag. Does Libreoffice work on xcfe? The alternative is that I just downgrade to Gnome 2 but emerge doesn't seem to want to do that either (it still tries to build 3.x packages)... I suppose I could just remove Libreoffice and re-build it once Gnome 2 (or xcfe is in place). I wish I could do an 'emerge -Ce libreoffice' in one fell swoop... :-S

dq

[vaxbrat]

I don't think kde vs xfce would be an issue. libreoffice does use a number of gnome oriented flags (gtk, eds, gnome, gstreamer quickly pop to mind). I doubt it would be able to build without the gimp toolkit (gtk) since that would be like trying to build kde without Qt. Another one that probably doesn't hurt to leave enabled is gstreamer. However the evolution-data-server (eds) is a sure fire way to crap up an install with all sorts of gnome-ish stuff that tends to break.

[The Doctor]

I believe the gtk use flag doesn't disable the toolkit. It disables the quick start feature. I have both gtk and gtk3 disabled on mine and it runs fine in i3. I really don't think anyone can say anymore unless you post the error.

Also, you should try to use emerge -c <package> rather than emerge -C whenever possible as the -c option checks to make sure it isn't destroying your system.

Check your package.unmask and package.keywords (or its replacement, package.accept_keywords) files and make sure that gnome3 is not included. If you are running on the unstable branch, you will have to keyword it, something like gnome-base/* amd64. It should work to then simply emerge gnome or gnome-light.

It may help to use emerge -auvND world && revdep-rebuild to make sure everything is really consistent. Just be alert for gnome3 rising from the grave. You may not have killed it yet.
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