Staudey One should absolutely NOT remove the GNOME desktop component!
That's good to know. In my case, apparently no harm was done. I used the Xfce VM for several days, doing everything that I normally would have done with my laptop itself, and never had even a hint of a problem. Apparently I was just lucky.
Is it possible that nothing of GNOME that Xfce required was removed? That would explain what I saw happen. It certainly would have stopped eopkg rmo
from removing anything that was still an active dependency.
Note that I'm not disputing what you wrote, and I'm not suggesting that David should ignore your advice, but I'm just trying to figure out why my experience was so different than what you predicted would happen.
My Xfce VM is still here -- it's just hibernating. Is there something I can tell it to do that would surely cause it to crash?