If you don’t think being lazy is a virtue I hope I can convince you the opposite. It turns out that if you read some of KPackageKit posts you might have read that I started coding it because of a feature I wanted to add to KDE, and no, that wasn’t KPackageKit itself.
It turns out that before I started to code it I was thinking on how could I make KDE package management experience nicer. At that time I normally used KPackage to manage my packages, and I realized that I mostly never opened KPackage to remove my unused applications.
Removing applications is a hard task first you need to know which applications do you have, then you need to know which ones you don’t use, and at the end open the package manage browse for them and remove them.
But about what time do you remember an application is not used? When you see it’s icon right on your face! And when it’s that? When you open our lovely Kickoff 😀
If you are still wondering what this has to do with laziness, I’ll tell you everything! If I wasn’t lazy enough to memorize the unused apps and go to the package manager I wouldn’t been writing KPackageKit on the first place!
So yes, as you can see from the screen shot below now we can uninstall applications from Kickoff!
The code went to review board, Aaron Seigo rapidly reviewed it, and now on KDE 4.7 you will have it available 😀
Hope you all enjoy it 😀
Dantti's Blog 
Very cool
Neato! Just a thought if it doesn’t do this already… I hope it has more of a confirmation than just asking for your admin password. It’s easy to automatically type that in when asked just out of habit. Some kind of “Are you sure you wish to permanently remove app foo from your system?” would make sure it’s a conscious choice.
Love the idea though! This will help keep a lot of peoples systems running leaner and faster 🙂 Thanks for the work on it!
Sure, I’ll see if tomorrow I post those dialogs screen shots. First it will ask if you want to search for the installed application (as we can’t be sure if is there by a package). Then it shows you the packages that contain that so you can double check it before hitting “Remove”…
And what about a proposed feature of installing features in kickoff? In Ubuntu’s console, if you enter a program name (or misspell it) it suggests you “The program xyz is available in package abc. You can install it using sudi apt blabla”
Can’t kickoff be enhanced that if it does not find the thing you are looking for on your computer offer “install xyz” if it finds it in repos?,Similar to the “Search for xyz” link
Sure, there is PackageKit command not found that could be used too, I’ll see what people think about this feature.
Thanks.
When doing a search for a app that is not installed, offering “install” for it would be nice too.
Hehe, seems like various uses want it 😛
Nice!
That’s very nice to do such simple ideas. Maybe we could also get a dedicated menu to install :
Menu>Audio/Video>More>Install Audio/Video software
This would lanch kpackage in the audio/video branch directly?
Hmm dunno I think this will make Kickoff too bloated with Icons, I personally don’t like to see that More icon since it tents to make the list of apps show a scroll bar which makes navigation harder..
There should also be an easy way to find and remove the dependencies that become unused when the app is removed.
Well apt can do that by automatically removing packages that were automatically installed (apt-get remove –auto-remove), but this is not the default behavior of PackageKit backends. I’ve been thinking on this for a while and maybe I’ll propose a clean feature to PackageKit so that apt cache can also be cleaned 😀
Your screen shot looks like you are about to uninstall Software Management? Wouldn’t that get you into trouble? 😉
Sure but if I choose some other application it would look like I’m saying it should be uninstalled and I bet some users or developers wouldn’t like 😉
Nice! There was a brainstorm feature request for this as well. Is this going to be in lancelot as well?
It can be put there if any lancelot developer is interested in adding this, the code is really simple.
Hi
Could you add a list of Recently Removed Apps to Kpackagekit so when people accidentally remove something they shouldn’t have it’ll be nice and easy to find it again
There is the history thing already, though the UI is a bit ugly but I plan to make it prettier soon.
I love the work you are doing and it is one of the things that really make KDE based distros easier to use for normal people!
There are a couple of things I would love to see in the program –
The sources list is a bit of a mess and it can be difficult to find the correct line if you have many ppa´s added. Why not just sort them alphabetically?
Also, one additional way of organizing them would be to group all the standard ones at the top and all 3rd party repo´s in a section below.
BUT – It can be a very long time between each time I check the list, and with some ppa´s, I sometime forget what program was the reason for adding them. So it would be nice to be able to add comments to each ppa.
Last, but not least – it would be nice to be able to add a color to each ppa that would show as a weak background color in the list of available packages for update. This way it would be easy to identify what updates are coming from what repo. Even be able to hove the mouse over an update and get a little more info about the upgrade package.
I must say I like the way Linux Mint has done it with a number for each package. Number 1 indicates packages that are tested etc. and that you can go for almost without thinking. This would be packages from the main repositories.
I have already had a couple of accidental upgrades that I would have preferred to be without because I did not know what repo the package is from…
The possibility to roll back an upgrade would also be sweet… 🙂
I am trying to follow what you are doing, because keeping a system up to date is one of the most important things to do.
Ah – and one more thing: I have been using apt-cacher ng and really love it. With a slow line and many computers in the house it is a real timesaver. Would be really nice to have a setting for it where you could just give the IP address for it. ANd if it can not find apt-cacher ng, it should offer to turn it off (but remember the IP address – it could just be a laptop that is travelling at the moment).
Hope some of these eventually will make it into a release. Thank you for your excellent work!