OK. Why the F are you worrying about his installation? Why are you installing it for him? Point him at documentation and let him do whatever he wants. He wants to switch distribution? Fine, let him google the manual. Do not install system for him, let him do it and learn in the process. Helping him with some advice I can understand, but this BS? Stop treating him like some special snowflake. Dude should learn his system and learn how to learn.
For the paycheck
/sarcastic post
Because he IS a special snowflake.
Not to go into too much detail, but he has a severe learning disability. So I help him when and where I can.
And I'm doing it to speed up the process so I can hang with him and play games.
OK then.apt-get install kubuntu-desktop
should work on his current installation, unless Canonical removed it. Won't hurt to try. If he installs packages himself, I'd assume half if not all of Qt libraries are already there anyway.
Edit: the wiki page is still there, so it should work. There you go: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/InstallingKDE
Ok then.
But is there anything in KDE that he would possibly need that the KDE desktop wouldn't have? I just want to minimize any confusion so I can explain everything well to him why I did this.
Edit: I've read alot in the last hour, but found nothing to address this question
What he needs can only be answered by himself, have him fiddle with it first then continue from there
I don't think so. Unless he (or you for him) customized it somehow (custom widgets, panels, maybe cairo or something like that). His GTK software should still be there as well, I'm pretty sure that when you install a metapackage, package manager removes only conflicting libraries from old packages, and it doesn't do it silently.
This worked WONDERFULLY!
Thanks to all who contributed, but especially @dmj, and @Baz, and @gatherercryptic!
Wonderful tips, and everything went smoothly. With the exception of Windows throwing a fit when it had to be reinstalled. But I got that fixed.
His computer is working better than before, and he's VERY happy with it.
I'm glad I could help
sudo apt list | wc -l
WARNING: apt does not have a stable CLI interface. Use with caution in scripts.
55982
wouldn't recommend using that method.