What you want to do is what I accidentally did.

I wanted to remove some programs as my partition was 96% full. I thought some the development software would be good as I would never use that.

I did: apt-get remove python --purge

It did not remove python but did remove a lot of other packages including KDE. If I had been paying more attention I would have noticed what was happening.

It's currently down to a bare bone OS. Is that what you want? I don't even have a way to get on the internet now. I can load the GUI XDM from the command line after it boots as a pure Debian installation. Arrrgh!!!

I had made a backup to an image file last week. Now I have to see if I can restore this thing.

sakiZ