apt-get autoremove

So, apt says I have a lot of "unneeded" packages, such as lightdm, everything xfce4 related, my music player, etc. A lot of the packages actually aren't needed, but I can't tell which is which. Can you help Lains?

>apt-get autoremove

Its better to have it and not need it than need it an not have it.

>>14304 I did this a while ago and it took out my wifi manager. You should do them individually.

>>14304 You might want to write everything important on a list, do sudo apt-get autoremove and the install the important bits again.

apt-get install the packages you need they will go to manually selected[1] themselves and therefore not get fuarrrking autouninstalled [1] installed and not as a dependency of some other packages >>14316 no! what the fuarrrk PS: from what i hear dist-upgrade can break things too and is therefore not meant to be in the update cronjob of servers

I have the same problem, why does this happen?

>>14487 This is a guess, but maybe unneeded means no package depends on it, and it was not installed by the user. So a package that came with the OS, or was a dependancy for a previously installed program.

apt-get install deborphan deborphan is a super useful program to finds packages that have no packages that are unrequired by other program and therefore safe to remove. here's a good sets of commands to clean up a debian system (run as root). //Remove all orphans deborphan --guess-all | xargs apt-get -y remove --purge //clean up apt-get autoclean apt-get autoremove

>>14304 it may have been that you removed a meta-package and now apt-get considers them orphaned. >>14514 this is a good program but again use it with extreme caution. it has a graphical front-end called gtk-orphan. See what it lists and then look the package up and decide if that's something you do or don't need.

>>14516 >this is a good program but again use it with extreme caution. I agree, you'll end up with unwanted removing with the --guess-all option. It's rather safe by default though. I use it like this : aptitude purge `deborphan` And never got any problems so far. The aptitude front-end is also good to spot unwanted packages and remove them.

>>14514 >>14516 >>14517 Just use: apt-get --purge autoremove You can also purge packages that were only removed with: dpkg -l | awk '/^rc/ {print $2}' | xargs sudo dpkg --purge

>>14521 did you even read the OP? if he tries to remove everything marked as orphaned he will delete what are probably system critical packages

>>14304 Anon, you removed something like ubuntu-desktop or fluxbuntu-desktop, didn't you A lot of those are definitely possible to remove (all the -dev packages, out of date libraries, etc), but just reinstall the meta package you stupidly removed.