I've seen/read much negative publicity about zeitgeist recently and
I am considering de-installing it from my stand-alone AMD-64 desktop PC,
which runs under Debian 8.6 "Jessie".

Will such a de-installation bring with it any serious negative
side-effects (like malfunctioning of other progs. due to unfulfilled
dependencies)? What is the current practical experience?

I'm only concerned about the original Debian platform and not any
of its derivatives.

Thanks in advance to anyone who can help.
--

Looking at debian website here https://packages.debian.org/jessie/zeitgeist, it shows on right side similar packages, that might be all dependencies and such.

Try:
that should list everything that would be removed to see if there is anything you actually need.

Also looks like if you use gnome3 or Unity, is where you will see some side effects from removing zeitgeist. But as I use neither one I cannot confirm.

Thanks for your response. I ran the command you suggested
and it gave some quite useful information, which I then
followed up. In short:
-- Unity is not installed on my machine;
-- the two services which seem to be possibly dependent
are rhythmbox and gedit.

rythmbox is a service I hardly ever use;

In gedit, zeitgeist is used in conjunction with a plugin
which, so far, I found no reason to enable; But if
zeitgeist is deleted and gedit 'downs tools', there are
other text editors around, in addition to the the famous
vi.

I found no obvious connection between Gnome and zeitgeist
but I could be mistaken on that account.

Again thanks for your help.
I think we can close out this thread.
Dynosaw
--

i run a zeitgeist-free desktop for a long time now.
try the dry-run.
both rhythmbox and gedit can be replaced by other programs.

alternatively, try uninstalling zeitgeist, ignoring dependencies, and see if gedit and rhythmbox still work.
not sure if that's possible on debian (it is on arch), and you'd have to find ways to make that permanent.

maybe not direct, but surely obvious.