Minimal gnome installation

[cubekii]

describe the request

Problem

gnome package have a lot of unnecessary packages like gnome-maps, gnome-contacts or gnome-characters.

Possible solutions:

Add an external selector GNOME_MINIMAL or modify the existing GNOME option.
A possible minimal package list is:

	def packages(self) -> list[str]:
		return [
			'gnome-shell',
			'gnome-session',
			'gnome-terminal',
			'gnome-control-center',
			'gnome-settings-daemon',
			'nautilus',
			'xdg-desktop-portal-gnome',
		]

[planetlife]

It installs 237 packages. My additions to it: gnome-desktop-backgrounds, gnome-disk-utility, gnome-text-editor

[technobirb]

I thought about this as well but saw this #750. TBH with the bloat in the gnome group I always do custom install. GNOME also recommends using their Flathub distribution instead of distro packages.

Based on dependencies (gdm, gnome-shell, gnome-session), only these 3 are needed. But perhaps using gdm to bring in others is a bit hacky.

'gdm',
'gnome-control-center',
'nautilus',

[h8d13]

Think its a good ask. Ideally you could pick full vs minimal examples. Similar to how we now handle KDE

[cubekii]

gdm don't needed in this list, greeters can be installed in other option.

[technobirb]

Fair, I didn't see that. I never used the Profile settings because it explicitly installs a lot of things that should have been dependencies.

p.s. gdm also doesn't fit quite well into the desktop profile framework (greeter, etc.) because of its dependencies (installing it will bring in the entire GNOME desktop). EDIT: wait I see... people can choose to install other greeter (e.g. lightdm) instead of gdm.
Anyway, I see KDE has 3 variants, plasma group (bloat), plasma-meta package (includes DM), plasma-desktop (no DM).