I guess it's all about dependecy management but needed to be sure. My case:
sudo apt-get purge nvidia*
The following packages will be REMOVED: nvidia-352* nvidia-cg-dev* nvidia-cg-toolkit* nvidia-opencl-icd-352* nvidia-prime* nvidia-settings* retroarch*
Hey, leave my retroarch alone, was my reaction. Any way to avoid it or just to go along with it and reinstall retroarch afterwards.
retroarch depends on nvidia-cg-toolkit so it gets removed if you remove nvidia-cg-toolkit.
As a side note sudo apt-get purge nvidia* most likely doesn't do what you want:
First the shell will try to expand nvidia*. So if you have for example a file named nvidia.txt in your current folder the shell will actually run
sudo apt-get purge nvidia.txt
If the shell can't expand nvidia* apt-get will interpret it as a regular expression (not a shell pattern!) meaning "nvidi followed by zero or more a" and then search for packages with names containing a matching substring.
That is apt-get will purge all packages with a name containing nvidi (without the a because the "zero" in "zero or more").
Better use
sudo apt-get purge 'nvidia.*'
for all package containing nvidia or
sudo apt-get purge '^nvidia.*'
if you want to remove all packages starting with nvidia.
