After running these two commands:

sudo apt-get install ubuntu-desktop

sudo apt-get remove ubuntu-desktop

I am left with a glut of installed packages that I don't need/want on my Lubuntu install. I just wanted to see how Unity performed under Lubuntu.

I've discovered I can view the list of installed programs by looking at my /var/log/apt/history.log

I'd like to simply cut and paste this list into a sudo apt-get remove command but first I need to delete the portions apt-get won't understand. Basically everything inside the parenthesis (including parenthesis themselves) needs to go. Additionally the following comma and space after each entry will also need deleting.

The closest I've come with sed so far is:

sed -e 's/(.*),[[:space:]]//g' apt-log.txt

This is not right since it deletes almost everything. I presume this is because its matching the very last instance of "), " and deleting everything before it until "(". Here's a link to program list from the log I'm trying to edit.

As you can imagine, I would rather not edit that list by hand. I know next to nothing about regular expressions and am trying to learn but a few specific pointers would go a long way. Or maybe there's a much better way to go about this?