My installation of Warband on my Mint partition was malfunctioning (refused to exit the merchantś house when starting a new game), so i wanted to do a reinstall of the latest version. For some reason, all i am getting now is a shell script to the GoG installer. I like .deb packages and i frankly prefer them until such a time that the Linux version of GoG Galaxy comes out, because it allows for easy removal in case Galaxy fails to detect the game(like it did with half of my Windows games).

I know there used to be a .deb version of the Linux version for Warband. What happened to it? Is the GoG installer the new norm? Or is my library simply having a glitch?

They're dead Jim. Some MojoSetup deal. You can simply $ unzip installer.sh or $ 7z x installer.sh to extract the installers.

Ok. Fair enough.

I'm not overly concerned with the installation process, but with the uninstall. I hate having to chase fragments, registry entries and other junk across a system just because no clean uninstall wizard is available (or because it got corrupted), and with .debs i knew i could completely purge a title if i wanted to.

Got any idea if these new installers come with such a clean one step uninstall process?

Could you? I've never actually installed with one. I prefer tarballs myself and have only extracted them. I simply delete the extracted directory to "uninstall".

Synaptic package manager can show you any .deb packages that you installed locally. You can then mark them for removal (removing only those components specific to the package), or do a complete removal, which also removed all dependencies that were not used by another package.

Pretty clever system actually. In some ways superior to the Remove programs wizard of Wind0ze.

And it's those dependencies that have me worried that I'm leaving things behind when I simply remove the game's folder. If you do it in Windows you are left stuck with a bunch of Registry entries that you can now only get rid off through an integrity scanner as well as manually digging through it. My Linux experience is somewhat limited so I am not yet savvy in what folders I need to screen for unused junk that may have been installed as dependencies.

Yes, I'm aware of how apt and the like work. Thing is GOG never listed any dependencies in it's DEB files. I'm nearly completely certain that doing a purge also wouldn't remove any game specific preferences/settings. GOG lists additionally dependencies on the game page which you would need to manually add and then wouldn't be automatically uninstalled when uninstalling the game. Most of which a fairly generic and you would need for other games. Some specific libraries are self-contained under a particular game folder.

You might be interested in this.

I think the current .sh installer just dump all files into the install folder? Like a compressed file. No registry thing. When you want to uninstall just go to that folder and run the uninstaller in the folder.

deborphan will help you