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.
These are just dependencies for your packages. However, Arch doesn’t automatically clean the downloaded files after installation so that ends up taking space. On my Dell laptop that has only a 64 GB eMMC, the installation package files took and whopping 5 GB of space, sitting there doing nothing. I nuked them (it didn’t remove the installed apps and libs, only the already used package files). Run:
sudo pacman -Scc