I'd like to recover some disk space and was wondering whether it's safe to remove Gnome, as I don't use it. I'm also hoping that it has the side effect of fixing the problem of the difference in font size that I see with some applications (e.g. Acrobat Reader, from Marillat's repository), which show up with ridiculously small font sizes, compared with KDE. What is the best procedure for removing the Gnome desktop environment? apt-get remove --purge gnome-desktop-environment obviously doesn't work, because it's a metapackage. Trying to remove other applications wants to remove a lot of other packages and I'm not sure it'll break my system, as has happened to me in the past. Any ideas please?