apt-get install lightdm icewm menu desktop-base xterm firefox-esr pulseaudio pavucontrol thunar accountsservice More on reddit.com

You don't need to uninstall gnome to use icewm. In the display manager (login prompt after you boot or after you logout) you should be able to select the DE/WM you want to login to. First make sure you have in fact installed icewm. If you installed GNOME you should have gdm as the display manager. I haven't used it in a very long time, so not sure how it looks, it's possible that it doesn't show you the option (at least maybe not in an intuitive way) to login to another DE/WM. lightdm at least will give you that option, so you may install that: apt install lightdm It should prompt you to select which dm to use by default, but if not run dpkg-reconfigure lightdm Logout or reboot and it should show you lightdm where it should be easier to find the menu for selecting which DE/WM you want to login to. To remove GNOME it depends on how you installed it, but if it was from the installer you probably installed task-gnome-desktop, so remove that package and then purge the automatically installed packages that are no longer needed... apt purge task-gnome-desktop apt autopurge Be aware that you may want to keep some of those apps. So when running autopurge have a good look at the list of removed packages and see if there's something you want to keep and mark them for manual installation (which can be done by simpling running apt install package-name). There's nothing wrong with keeping gnome or other DEs installed, it will just take more disk space. More on reddit.com

If you install without a DE, then install the components you actually want later, you can save a huge amount of space because you haven't pulled in a billion and one useless apps you'll never use. Last time I did that with Kde, I had a usable environment in well under 2G (a few years back, but probably still true). More on reddit.com

Assuming that you have no login manager or any other window manager or desktop environment already installed in your system, including the following lines in your .profile file will run startx automatically: if [[ -z $DISPLAY ]] && [[ "$(tty)" = "/dev/tty1" ]]; then exec startx fi Edit: The above lines can be included either on .profile or .bash_profile. More on reddit.com