Uninstall proxmox-ve

Yotasi

New Member
Aug 11, 2025
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Hi this might be a bit of a weird question but, I would like to uninstall proxmox-ve. I've installed proxmox from the ISO, but I've only used that because I found that Proxmox installs on my shiny new Minisforum S100.
Where other distros have failed completely, proxmox installed and it works perfectly.
But I'm not really using any of the proxmox things and I'd like to remove proxmox entirely, keeping just the debian trixie that is underneath.
Is it enough for me to just 'apt remove proxmox-ve'? Will the debian installation survive this?
 
you can remove most of the PVE packages and the core Debian should continue to work fine - if you want to revert to a pure Debian, you need to downgrade quite a few packages and disable the PVE repositories, and downgrading is not supported in general so you might need to fix a few things up manually afterwards..
 
Where other distros have failed completely...
CachyOS would be my suggestion for an up-to-date distro, but I don't know the use case for it.
I googled your "PC stick" and I'm not really sure if any distro with a desktop environment is good for this thing. ;)
 
you can remove most of the PVE packages and the core Debian should continue to work fine - if you want to revert to a pure Debian, you need to downgrade quite a few packages and disable the PVE repositories, and downgrading is not supported in general so you might need to fix a few things up manually afterwards..
I just removed everything that started with 'pve'.
Now there's a debian left with some small residual stuff, but nothing major.
Thanks, this is what I wanted. I don't mind having the pve repos there, if there's nothing installed from them, it can't hurt.
Just wanted a leaner system since I'm not using anything of proxmox anyway.
Thanks for the confirmation that it was just removing packages. :)
 
CachyOS would be my suggestion for an up-to-date distro, but I don't know the use case for it.
I googled your "PC stick" and I'm not really sure if any distro with a desktop environment is good for this thing. ;)
Luckily it's not a desktop, it's a little server. ;-)
 
As long as you keep that Proxmox repository in your apt config, you'll get kernel updates too. So no need to replace the kernel. :)
 
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I read that you wanted to remove Proxmox entirely but it's of course fine to keep using any part of it that you like. Please let people know you uninstalled most of Proxmox if you start a new support request in the future.