Is it safe to remove a package "Required By: None"?

I am running an XFCE flavoured manjaro and am trying to familiarize myself more and more with pacman.

Now I believe to probably have packages which are not actually needed and am looking to understand better whether they are save to remove.

My current example is gnome-icon-theme, which the pamac GUI presents me to be upgradable.

pacman -Qi gnome-icon-theme says "Required By: None". That plus not using gnome makes me believe the package to be obsolete.

I can find a GNOME entry in the graphical >Appearance >Icons though but as it is not highlighted I believe I am not using it (and wouldn’t mind to change whether it was in play)

Would there be anything else to look out for?

Only you can decide that - but generally speaking - from a system perspective - yes, it’s safe.

The specific package gnome-icon-theme has been moved to AUR and therefore removed from the repo. The reason is, it has been replaced by Adwaita - so it is most likely not needed.

Even though you may not be using Gnome desktop - gnome is everywhere - XFCE is built using the gnome toolkit - so the statement not using Gnome makes it obsolete - is not always true.

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perfect, thnks. Exactly the kind of response I was hoping for.

Package gnome-icon-theme was removed from repo and moved to AUR (probably), because I just removed it too day or so ago. It was explicitly installed for one reason or the other, so it won’t show up as an orphan.

But there are a lot of explicitly installed packages with "Required By: None" and you can find them with pacman -Qt

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i logged in to ask the same question as i was intrigued by this AUR package update notification.
so i assume it is safe to remove.

if you are, as me, not 100% secure with pacman … look at the difference between pacman -R gnome-icon-theme vs pacman -Rs gnome-icon-theme

as far as I understand the matter pacman -R (in our little example here) would leave gnome-icon-theme-symbolic (being a dependency of gnome-icon-theme) as an orphan on the system while pacman -Rs also gets rid of it recursively (the -s option meaning recursive).

Not knowing about or using Rs may leave a lot of orphaned packages on your system over time.

$ sudo pacman -Rs gnome-icon-theme
checking dependencies...

Packages (2) gnome-icon-theme-symbolic-3.12.0-6  gnome-icon-theme-3.12.0-7

Total Removed Size:  11,72 MiB

:: Do you want to remove these packages? [Y/n]
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when I’ll delete it,it will be through Pamac.
and i prefer not to mess with orphans, also they don’t take much space in my case.

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