I noticed while updating my system just how many packages I have installed that I don’t recognize.

I tend to think that minimalism is better for security, so I’d like to remove any packages that I’m not using, but this is a bit of a scary task.

Does anybody have a safe method for reviewing and purging unused or bloat packages while obviously making sure not to accidentally remove important dependencies?

I’m on arch btw.

  • nousEnglish
    3·
    24 hours ago

    Clean orphaned dependencies: sudo pacman -Rs $(pacman -Qtdq)

    In addition to this, or rather before, you can run pacman -D --asdeps package_name to mark a package as a dep. If it is no longer required by something else it will be removed with the above. This can be useful for things that are deps that you installed manually at some point for some reason.

    And remember that you can recover from anything, even removing base packages or bootloader ones with a live cd and chroot or using pacman with a different root with the --root /mnt flag to pacman.

    Otherwise if your system still boots it is just a matter of following the install instructions for whatever is not working like you did the first time.

    • audaxdreik@pawb.socialEnglish
      1·
      15 hours ago

      In addition to this, or rather before, you can run pacman -D --asdeps package_name to mark a package as a dep. If it is no longer required by something else it will be removed with the above. This can be useful for things that are deps that you installed manually at some point for some reason.

      Oh, that’s some amazing info, thanks!

      I had noticed this might be a problem when I was setting something up and tried to install a dependency that was already on the system. It informed me it was being set to explicit and I wondered if it might lead to a situation like that.

      • nousEnglish
        1·
        37 minutes ago

        --asdeps also works when installing something to immediately mark it as a dep. Can be useful for non dep packages if you only need it temporarily as it will be removed the next time you purge unused deps.