Motivation:
I want to remove applications I do not use to speed up my package processing tasks like dist upgrades, regular updates, but also for saving disk space and other reasons. I know this is a complex topic so first I will ask my question and second I will give some answers I already found out.
Question:
How do I find out which package I did not used at all or for a long time? For example I always use the VLC so I could remove other players like Totem. Of course package dependencies could force me to have programs installed which I will never use.
Notes:
-
Find the packages which consume much space via synaptic:
Select "Status" in lower left, select "Installed" in upper left, sort
column on "size" in upper right. Then you can decide which big
packages you really need. -
Use
aptitude autoremove
-
Use
ubuntu-tweak
's Janitor for removing old kernel packages, old configs, apt-cache entries, etc. -
Manually search for applications for a given task that you usually solve with your standard app. E.g. Movie player, Music player, Office program, Browser etc. (BTW: this is what I want to be helped with my question)
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When removing packages I always favour "apt-get purge" over "aptitude remove –purge" as aptitude often will also remove essential packages due to package dependencies. E.g. when removing "evolution" (as I use thunderbird) aptitude wants to remove also "ubuntu-desktop" and 756 other packages as well, while apt-get just removes evolution and its helping pacakges like evolution-common.
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Ubuntu lense gives me most recent used applications which are candidates for keeping 🙂
-
Employ
deborphan
as I read in this related answer: How do I clean up my harddrive? -
I should certainly keep essential packages: Keep only essential packages
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This question is pretty much a duplicate of How to see what installed packages I have never used for cleaning purposes but covering only few aspects. However one answer suggests to use a program called unusedpkg but the link seems down.
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There is also a program called Kleen http://code.google.com/p/kleen/ but it won't compile in 11.10. However I hacked it to compile but the results are unusable, as for example the g++ package was marked as not used for 203 days, but actually I used it seconds ago for compiling Kleen itself 😉 So don't use this tool.
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On http://wiki.debian.org/DebianPackageInformation I read the the package popularity-contest will produce log files with usage statistics. Unfortunately I didn't enabled the popularity contest so I can't find this log file.
Best Answer
If you opt in,
popularity-contest
reports usage statistics back to Ubuntu, but it could also be used for purposes like yours. From it's man page:The key word there is executable. So you'll probably get some false hits for data packages, etc.
So, for example,
popularity-contest | grep '<OLD>'
should give you a list of packages that have not been used for more than three months.popcon-largest-unused
gives you a list of unused package sorted by size.