linux – Uninstalling pulseaudio removed a bunch of things that I don’t know how to re-install

The title says it all; I was debugging problems with pulseaudio after I had some audio issues. One of the suggestions I encountered was to “reinstall pulse”, and so naively I simply did sudo apt remove pulseaudio and then later, after deleting pulseaudio config folder from my home dir installed it back with sudo install pulseaudio.

The problem was of course that when I removed pulseaudio it also removed a huge list of packages that were “no longer needed”.

When I re-installed pulseaudio later none of those integrations were included. While I am sure many of them were just bloat, one such package that was kind of important was the audio volume widget in KDE and also the ability to change volume with media keys on the keyboard.

I am on Debian x64 with KDE.

So how can I know which packages were previously installed that are now missing?

I tried looking at the output from sudo apt-cache depends pulseaudio and sudo apt-rdepends -s Suggests pulseaudio without getting any wiser.

Thanks!