[aneutron]

In my (albeit limited) experience, those "useless" packages tend to be not so useless in order to have a somewhat functional installation.

Example: By default, Ubuntu+GNOME installs various utilities that you WILL need unless you want to do everything by hand. nm-applet, bluetooth applet, volume applet, etc.

Of course you have to add this to the i3 configuration manually, but that's the beauty of running i3. Yes you may have useless packages hanging around. But they will not be running UNLESS and ONLY IF you wish for that to be the case.

But when you need those "useless" packages, and you will most certainly need them to connect to your Wi-Fi network, you will be happy to have them already on GNOME and not have to install everything package by package and perhaps even compile an alternative software because it's the only one you found referenced on a reddit thread.

Basically, what I'm trying to say is, it's fun to do this once as an exercise to know how your computer works (learn what a compositor is, learn how pulseaudio works, etc.). But beyond that, it starts to get pretty tedious and not fun.

[efazati]

You can include them based on your need instead of adding them because someone else likes to use them