Don’t panic when you uinstall Evolution and not see a lot of things on your GNOME desktop

Always have a towel with you because every time you do something funky, you might need the sense of comfort that a towel gives. Even if you’re not travelling throughout the galaxy. But seriously, don’t panic! Whether you have a towel or not, you should be fine even in the middle of an empty desktop without any panels, etc.

One evening I decided to uninstall Evolution because I wanted to just use Gnus. And I wanted more space. The careless, thoughtless me uninstalled Evolution without reading the list of apps that will be uninstalled along with it. So I went on with it then I shut down my laptop. When I booted it up, and logged in already I didn’t see my familiar GNOME desktop stuff like the panels and launchers. Thank goodness that my desktop has some directories on it and I clicked it and went to /usr/bin and looked for the apps I wanted to use like the GNOME control center, a terminal, etc. Later, a co-worker showed up and told me something: you could just install ubuntu-desktop again and everything should be fine.

I only panicked for a bit so that’s a good thing and I felt a little embarrassed over it. But at least I learned something. Don’t panic! You will figure it out. I just got worried because gnome-desktop wasn’t installing because the dependency (gnome-keyring-manager) wasn’t installable for some reason or another. In any case, everything got fixed that morning so everything’s cool again. Just remember: Don’t just uninstall Evolution because it’s a dependency for the GNOME.