I have recently installed Debian 9 on a laptop to get used to Debian's novelty, on clicking the "show applications" icon under Gnome I find most of the 3 screens displayed are games which are useless to me.

My question: How can I completely remove all the games on the machine so that the screens only shows applications I can use?

Thank you for your help.

apt-cache show <package> will display a lot of information about <package>
You need to apt-get remove <package> if Section is game.

Or you can use synaptic, select all the games and uninstall them.

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i think op talks about gnome's software manager that is a little too advertise-y, asking op to install all sorts of games etc.
i don't think these games are actually installed.

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It seems ondoho is correct since issuing the command
invariably gives the message
so the question is: how can I remove all those icons which take screen-space and make navigation unnecessarily more difficult? Right-clicking on these icons only gives options of saving it.

so go back to #3. Those games are not installed, therefore you cannot uninstall them. These are "only" ads and nothing more (= ask you to install those games).
But probably misunderstood, would be better to post an image or explain what are you talking about.

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don't use gnome software manager.(*)
use synaptic package manager.

(*) ok, there's a small chance that this is configurable. most likely through gconf commands. good luck finding out how (askubuntu?).

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Since my last post, I had to reinstall Debian 9.2 (one partition was a bit too small) and I did not install Gnome so I do not have the problem anymore.

if you think your problem is solved please mark the thread solved.
Thanks

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There is no proposed solution to removing those icons in Gnome, so marking it as solved would be somewhat deceiving.

Just remove the games packages you don't want.

They are dependencies of the full gnome metapackage, so you would want to install (or mark as manually installed) the gnome-core and whatever other packages you want to keep.

See http://forums.debian.net/viewtopic.php?f=16&t=104157 for more info on metapackages.

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So far, it appears I draw more satisfaction having not installed Gnome, I have installed a bunch of others which make things a bit confusing since the installed applications give no hint (except things like "Mate terminal") from which DM they descend. However, I do not want to spend time figuring that out and neither do I expect anyone else to do it for me.
Debian evolves very quickly now, not necessarily for the better as I find there are too many things in it that used to work better, therefore it could be a complete waste of time delving in this any longer.
Just as an example, I found this in Debian 9 /var/www/html/index.html:
It appears the word "which" should have been "and", otherwise only the "s" at the end of "provides" indicates the incorectness of the sentence that implies that "previous releases" provide better security out of the box (which could have been what was meant in the first place). I do not see any increased security (compared to "previous releases" - 7, 6, 5) regardless of how it is interpreted.

+1 for that.

on a side note, if you run your own small server, apache is total overkill.
i switched to nginx about a year ago and never looked back. it's so much lighter, less cluttered, and likely just as safe.

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@rblampain
I think the "improved security" refers to the new default root meaning any additional vhost roots created under /var/www are not now also accessible via the default (ootb) vhost.

The description seems fairly clear to me - it may not be exactly grammatically correct, but likely the maintainer who wrote it is not a native english speaker - file a bug report if you think it needs correction, that's why the system exists.

But, yes, I agree, newer is not always better ...

Also, bear in mind it's not the distro's fault in a lot of cases, upstream moves on and the maintainers generally must follow as best as possible.

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