*COMPLETELY* remove software?

Depends on the program.

In general, it sufficies to remove the ~/.wine directory to reliably
wipe all traces of all Windows apps. (That's the nuclear bomb
option, and I use it often, but then I don't have a lot of
installed Windows apps.)

But some windows apps might store settings in your home directory, so it depends on the app.

Sorry, I didn't mean to put this in the Wine section, I was looking at one of my old posts, then pressed "Ask Question." In this case, it'd be Pidgin.

Oh gosh. I am really sorry. I am having a tendency to press the wrong buttons. I think this will open the question back up.

sudo apt-cache purge pidgin should do the trick.

When uninstalling an app you can also

sudo apt-get --purge remove pidgin

However, I've noticed that this doesn't always do what I think it should. Sometimes you just have to locate the hidden folder in your /home/user directory and delete that. Maybe the apt-cache option above works better. I'll have to try that sometime and see.

apt-cache purge pidgin
raises an error saying that there's no such parameter: "purge"

I'v encountered the problem that not everything is uninstalled several times. Using "apt-get --purge remove ...." is supposed to delete more than "apt-get remove", but I haven't ever been able to see a difference between these two options. It was never like the uninstalled applications never existed as Justin described at the beginning.

(btw, its "Remove" and "Remove completely" in the synaptic package manager, isn't it?)

Oh, my bad.
sudo apt-get purge pidgin

Nope, it doesn't completely remove it. And, there doesn't seem to be a hidden folder for Pidgin. =\

I've also tried

-----------
sudo apt-get --purge autoremove pidgin-data
-----------

It doesn't work either.

Try it this way.

sudo apt-get --purge remove pidgin

not autoremove.

The procedure Dan suggests is the most fool-proof. Removing apps under Wine
has the same limitations as removing them under Windows -- the uninstall
script is only as good as the developer who wrote it. Because the
installation is proprietary (usually), there's not much way to know if
everything was removed.

If you are brave and you have other programs you don't want to install, you
can try your hand at editing the registry to clean out the kruft. There's a
regedit.exe GUI that is a functional replacement for the registry editor
Microsoft ships. Be careful to make a backup copy of the files ending in
".reg" found at ~/.wine/. The windows registry is a finicky beast.

Try this:

sudo apt-get remove --purge pidgin

and if it doesnt work

paste the output of:

whereis pidgin

Regards

In order to locate files of an applications, I often use
sudo find /* -iname *pidgin*

this searches the entire filesystem for a file or directory with "pidgin" in its name. that takes quite some time and if there are many results, you may want to write the output in a file via

sudo find /* -iname *pidgin* > out

to cancel the search-progress press ctrl-c

Hi! The problem with Pidgin is that the data is hidden in a folder in your home folder called .purple. To get to it, go to /home/YOURUSERNAMEHERE/.purple