Ubuntu – How to uninstall NetBeans

The best way to remove Netflix Desktop (see also official site) depends on how you installed it.

So far, Netflix Desktop is not available in any of Ubuntu's official software sources. So the project maintains a PPA. You most likely installed it that way.

If you installed netflix-desktop from the PPA:

If you're planning to reinstall Netflix Desktop soon, your best bet it to just remove the package installed from the PPA (without removing the PPA).

Otherwise the best thing to do is to purge the PPA from your configured software sources and uninstall netflix-desktop (and any other packages that might be installed from it--that PPA does provide other pacakges as well, and unless you know you want them, you probably don't).

Purging the PPA and all the software installed from it can be done with a single command--but you may need to install the command first. This does both:

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install ppa-purge && sudo ppa-purge ppa:ehoover/compholio

Even if you've already removed just the package with sudo apt-get remove netflix-desktop, you can still remove the PPA and any other packages installed from it with the above ppa-purge command. (See this question if you're interested in details of how ppa-purge, and its alternatives, work.)

If you got nextflix-desktop the old way, unpacking the archive in your home folder:

Before the PPA, Netflix Desktop was installed by unpacking an archive to a .netflix-desktop folder inside the user's home folder. As blogged, you can remove that by running:

rm -Rf ~/.netflix-desktop

Be very careful when you run that. If you accidentally put a space between ~ an / or / and ., you'll delete your whole home directory, including all your documents!

(If you prefer to remove the .netflix-desktop folder from the comfort of a GUI, open a Nautilus window, navigate to your home folder if you're not already there, press Ctrl+H to click View > Show Hidden Files, and delete the .netflix-desktop folder.)

If you were using Netflix Desktop installed this way, you might want to try the newer version from the PPA; it may work better for you. And if you used the old version and then tried the PPA version without removing the old version, you may be able to fix some problems with it by removing the folder from the old version and starting over.

dpkg is a debian package manager, since you have installed Nebeans by a (presumably local) script, it will not be listed in dpkg -l.

Retrieve an application's command from it's desktop file:

When you have an application installed of which you don't know the command, but you do have a desktop file, you can read it from the desktop file's content. The link you have on your desktop is a desktop file. Look for a line, starting with "Exec=". What comes after that string is the command you are looking for.

Make the application available in Dash:

Normally, applications install a desktop file in /usr/share/applications (like emacs does). If a desktop file is located in either that location or in ~/.local/share/applications, it appears in Dash automatically, so if you copy the desktop file into ~/.local/share/applications, it will appear in Dash after next log in.

Open an application by (only) it's binary file name (or not):

Netbeans did not open on the command netbeans because the shell does not know the path to your binary file. If binary files are located in /usr/bin (the default path to application's binary files) they will open right away, without the path-prefix. That is the case for example with emacs.

If an application does not install its binary file in /usr/bin, there are three possibilities; either the application's desktop file's execute line includes the path to the file, as you can see for example in the execute line of the file-explorer indicator's desktop file: /opt/indicator-file-explorer/bin/indicator-file-explorer, or the path to the binary file is added to $PATH (/etc/environment), so the shell will search for binary files in that directory too, or the application installs a link to the binary file in /usr/bin. All three options do occur, no matter the way an application is installed.

If you installed your application locally, it would be a bad idea to (try to-) create a link to the application's binary file from a global directory, such as /usr/bin; other users would be stuck with a dead link, because they have no valid permissions in your home directory. Therefore, the easyest way is to create a local bin directory (~/bin) and create a link to the local binary file from that directory (ln -sf). That way you can run your locally installed Netbeans by the single command netbeans.