from gpstarman@lemmy.today to linux@lemmy.ml on 08 Jul 2024 12:28
https://lemmy.today/post/13094968
What are the packages that comes default with Linux Mint Cinnamon that I can remove without any problems.
Linux Mint comes with lots of packages installed by default to give full experience to new users. But not everyone needs everything. In my case for example, I don’t need celluloid, pix, hexchat, hypnotix, rhythmbox, LibreOffice, etc,… Those applications has their own audience and Linux Mint including them is a good thing but I personally don’t want them.
Mini Rant or QA maybe?
I searched the internet a bit for the answer, on various forums, and subreddits. And All the people who asked this question got obliterated as far as I’ve seen. The common answers are:
if you remove the applications that came installed with Mint by default, it will cause Dependency issues.
If I remove an application and the dependencies shold be removed UNLESS some other application need those dependency, right? If that’s the case, why removing packages can cause dependency issues?
Why would you want to remove essential applications like LibreOffice, pix etc. ? (this question is asked in the sense of “what sane person would want to remove those?”)
Cause why not? Maybe I like GwenView more than Pix, maybe I don’t need office applications at all. Why this even matter?
If you want don’t want Mint’s default applications, then what’s the point of using Mint? Just use something like Ubuntu server or something. People need to realize that lot of people (at least me) using Mint for it’s System management (updates, apt source list, etc…) via GUI ability. Just because I want to manage my system with ease, that doesn’t mean I need everyt applications it offers me.
I honestly feel bad for the person who asked the question in the first place. They didn’t got the answers till the very end. All they got is Criticism and it’s not constructive one.
Why this kind of behaviour even exist?
P.S.: I’m using Mint inside VM for testing purposes. I don’t want my VM to take a lot of space. That’s why I don’t need lot of applications.
threaded - newest
Mint is actually really good about not having weird dependency chains, and even if it did uninstalling apps would warn you about it. That is a very strange thing for people to have said. It is perfectly normal and good to have some things you don’t want or prefer an alternative to and uninstall them. Default Mint is a great sane starting point for a complete OS, and I think their updater is the best in the entire Linux world, but it’s still Linux. You can still customize it to your heart’s content. Anyone who says otherwise is just being a creep.
There are a lot of linux people out there who are…very odd. I ran into a bunch who laughed at the thought of a gui terminal server - something i’ve been working with professionally for over two decades. Some really don’t understand jack nor shit and just parrot half-truths and poor knowledge like it’s gospel. “Don’t uninstall apps, you’ll break shit!!” No, uninstalling apps improperly breaks shit…
/rant
(Btw if i see one more person wail about how terrifying it is to run DD ima choke a bitch…)
One of my big Wayland gripes is how hard it is to set up a terminal server. AFAIK the most recent gnome is the only thing that can do it and it’s session doesn’t persist over disconnects.
I actually had pretty good success using the ol’ RDP hack, both in mint and ubuntu. This is a fun guide once you get past the raging unearned elitsm “apparently this is a thing” yeah no shit idiot I used to run it on friggin’ NT
I love xrdp, but it isn’t compatible with Wayland. Issue when some distros are looking to fully remove Xorg in the near future.
have you tried KRdp?
edit: Huh, apparently supports it natively?
The caveat being it is sharing the local console and the session needs to be logged in on the local console first, literal screen sharing. The most recent Gnome can create a new virtual session but it is not persistent, if your network hiccups you must log in again and it is a brand new blank slate. They are getting closer though.
Ugh, yeah that’s a dealbreaker. At that point you may as well install a remote kvm or use the console in IPMI/IDRAC
Fun DD story time, I guess.
I, back when I was a very young and very dumb kid doing sysadmin things I shouldn’t have been doing, broke a production DNS server with it.
I needed a boot floppy to install on another system, and the DNS box was RIGHT THERE, with a floppy drive.
No big deal, just a simple dd command:
dd if=redhat-boot.img of=/dev/hda
Okay cool I have a boot floppy, wait it didn’t work? Weird. DNS is down? Also weird.
In conclusion, lol.
Oooooooof lol
It’s always DNS (unless it’s NTP).
So now should we add dd to DNS and NTP? No. dd an image over something you shouldn’t is simply a daft thing to do and I’m sure many here use dd instead of a GUI or something more friendly that stops you from doing the daft thing. However, forgetting to consider DNS and NTP is when you cease to be a technician. DNS and NTP failure cause way more problems than they should at a casual glance.
When I was a lad people used to riff on # rm -r ./ * destroying systems (lol). Bear in mind that . means current directory and … means parent directory and that all directories apart from / have both . and … entries. So rm -r should walk both upwards and then downwards. Even better, because Unix type systems can do this sort of thing, deleting the rm binary itself won’t stop the destruction. I’m not sure when the box would eventually panic, if at all. I think I’ll clone a VM and find out.
rm these days won’t do that. It even has a --no-preserve-root option …
I just don’t understand the terminal gatekeepers. Isn’t it nice to have GUI, you don’t have to remember endless number of commands, right?
If you don’t want GUI, then just use terminal.
Personally, I’m not afraid of terminal or anything, it may be even the faster way of doing things. But I like GUI, where every option is just laid out for you.
Terminal in this instance meaning “endpoint”, not command line
Ik man. I’m just saying that they laughed at you for needing gui for ‘terminal’ (endpoint), suggesting that you should use ‘terminal’ (cli)
The most ridiculous thing was i clearly explained this was for users on a closed network to have a machine they coukd rdp to for email and browsing. I mean yeah you can totally access your mail via terminal but there’s a reason I haven’t done that outside postfix checks since 1997
Infuriating man.
Just like @SirBoostALot@hear-me.social said,
Thanks man.
Those applications uninstalled just fine without any dependency issues last time I tried Mint.
If you’re unsure, make a snapshot of your current VM state (if your VM software supports it). Then just uninstall the junk you don’t need until Mint breaks. Restore snapshot, test some more, and so on. Those on real hardware should use Timeshift to create snapshots.
Tip: Run
sudo apt autoremove package
in the terminal so you can see which dependencies that are removed.Worth mentioning that
apt
generally asks if you want to continue after listing what it's going to remove so this ought to be safe to do, because you can always say no.Caveat: It's vaguely possible ultra-rare configurations might blast through without asking. If in any doubt, backup or take a Timeshift snapshot, or whatever your system does, before adding or removing software. Overkill? Maybe. It'd only really need to be the first time before you know what your local
apt
does.I’m pretty sure that’s not what autoremove does.
Thank you.
Traditionally on Ubuntu-based systems, those packages get installed as dependency of a meta package that pulls the entire desktop experience, for instance on Ubuntu this is ubuntu-desktop (the default GNOME experience), kubuntu-desktop (the KDE Plasma experience) and so on. I believe this won’t be much different for Mint.
The consequence of uninstalling such package is removal of the meta package. You can totally do that, but then the dependencies (so the cinnamon desktop with everything that makes it Linux Mint) are due for autoremoval of no longer needed packages (so apt autoremove would remove it all) unless they’re marked as explicitly installed and needed by you. Unless they’re “optional” dependencies. It’s hard to tell precisely what will happen without access to actual Linux Mint, but in theory you can just cherry pick whatever you want from that big chunky meta package, or remove it all and only reinstall stuff that interests you.
I personally wouldn’t bother and just set my default apps to my preference and if the app menu is too crowded I’d hide them using something like Alacarte (old school GNOME menu editor). That way you know that full system upgrades wont cause any problems, and you effectively replace apps as you desire.
And it’s true that for lightweight system with only what I need, something like Debian or Arch would be much better. My experience is that usually modifying easy-to-use distribution is (while perfectly possible) more effort than building one from the ground up.
They said, Debian Gnome comes with a stock application, a selfie application and a number of games pre-installed.
Yes, but it has netinstall and you can choose to only install the base system. You then boot to tty and apt install anything you want.
Beware, it’s much harder to get complete OS this way, and even with working DE you may still miss something like userspace drivers, firmware, crucial services like NetworkManager, bluetooth etc. You’re on your own with finding out how Debian works
I’ve done pretty much that, by way of debootstrap. It’s a fun way to set up a system.
I think that live-task-non-free-firmware-pc (gotta have the nonfree apt.sources tho), linux-image-amd64, sudo, and systemd-timesyncd are just enough to get started. Then add gdm3(which pulls in a bunch of gnome), and a terminal (I like kitty & ptyxis).
Thank you.
If you're looking for candidate apps to consider removing,
du -sh /usr/bin/* /usr/lib/* | sort -h
is one quick way to find some that use significant amounts of space. On my system for example that points out things including blender, chromium, firefox, libreoffice, llvm, gcc, java, and pandoc as using a lot of space. It may not catch everything but it's better than just guessing.Thank You.
It’s very simple in Mint, just right-click it in the menu, click Uninstall, and see if it warns you about dependencies.
Thunderbird, Hypnotix, Hexchat and Firefox can be uninstalled safely for sure, I recommend against uninstalling the Update Manager and strongly recommend against uninstalling Python, as some other programs may/will depend on those
Recommend highly against that. That GUI way does not show package dependencies and will not warn you possibly if you uninstall a bunch of stuff.
It does for me? On Cinnamon DE, if that makes any difference?
What exactly does it show?
A GUI window showing a warning and listing packages dependent on what you’re uninstalling. It has a cancel-button in background colour, and a red uninstall-button.
Very nice. A big advantage over GNOME software or KDE discover
If you uninstall python or gjs it will most likely remove the entire desktop
I did it once, intending to reinstall it. Basically everything broke including APT. sudo apt install python didn’t work. That was a reinstall.
Yeah,
apt-get
should still work but Mint’sapt
is a Python wrapper IIRCDoes Mint still maintain their own apt command?
Yes, at least yesterday when I checked they still did
My understanding of that story was Mint kind of did their own thing first, then Ubuntu (or Debian above them) also did it, and I didn’t know if Mint adopted the upstream thing or kept their version.
Thanks for the heads up.
Thank You.
I’ve been using Linux for a long time. When I install my fist step is to uninstall. I get not wanting things taking up space.
You should be able to remove things like LibreOffice and so on without any issues.
In the past, dependency chains screwed things up depending on the distro. (Remove Chrome? Oh, well, we’ll remove your DE too! I remember once uninstalling VLC, which I never use, wanted to uninstall the browser and other media apps…)
I did go and look around, and you are right. Lots of posts, older and more recent, telling people not to uninstall and change to a minimal distro.
The first thing I do is remove all of the foreign language fonts and documentation. That frees up a lot of space.
Thanks for the tip. I’ll do that.
Thanks for understanding man.
Celluloid, pix, hexchat, hypnotix, rhythmbox, LibreOffice all uninstall just fine without any issues. The only one of those I personally keep is Libreoffice.
Thank you.
Just try it and make a list?
sudo apt remove PACKAGE
will prompt you to confirm and you see the dependencies before.Generally, 2 things:
So these 2 are kinda opposite if you are on a “bloated” distro like Mint.
“uninstall” isn’t an option for apt. You might be thinking of “remove” but in OP’s case “purge” probably makes more sense.
Oh oops didnt use Ubuntu since forever.
“uninstall”? 🤔
“sudo apt yeet”
Sorry about the rude responses from some people.
You don’t have to be sorry. Stupid people exists everywhere, even on Linux community.
Thank you for your kind words man.
You can right click and hit uninstall/remove
Ik how to remove. But what I want to know is what are possible landmines. Just like when installing Steam uninstalled the entire system.
Installing steam shouldn’t remove the entire system
I did for Linus (tech tips). I know it’s not always the case, but I just want to be safe.
Why not tackle this from the opposite end, where instead of removing things and potentially breaking stuff, you add what you need instead? Debian is what Mint and Ubuntu are based on, and you can install a very bare bones system from the start.
I want Mint’s way of updating packages, installing kernels, Adding ppa, changing apt server, etc.
It’s so easy to manage the system. But I just don’t want the extra packages like hypnotix and etc… Although, I can see why all those things were there, It’s just me.
I’m a pro GUI person, so I like Mint.
Please don’t take this as one of the rude responses you refer to above - that is not my intent.
Why do you want to use Mint in the first place? The only thing that distinguishes Mint from any other Debian derivative, is that they have made all these software choices for you, and you don’t have to do anything to get your system ready for you to be productive. It’s aimed at folks who don’t want to think at all about any of the concerns you have about customizing.
If you don’t like the choices Mint has made, there is literally no reason to choose it. Start with a minimal version of Debian, and add whatever you want. The end result will be the same as starting with Mint and swapping things out. The only difference will be the address of your repositories.
.
I want Mint’s way of updating packages, installing kernels, Adding ppa, changing apt server, etc.
It’s so easy to manage the system. But I just don’t want the extra packages like hypnotix and etc… Although, I can see why all those things were there, It’s just me.
I’m a pro GUI person, so I like Mint.
I think you have a point there, but the reasons why Mint does not ship a streamlined version may be simply because the maintainers don’t want to bother with a whole different context to build, document and support.
I do think there would be value in a less “batteries included” Mint. I disagree with people in this thread who claim the “whole purpose” of Mint is all the stuff it packs, because it goes far beyond the essentials. Mint develops a lot of GUIs for the user to be able to configure the system. I think just these plus the in-house Mint core apps would make for a sweet, lightweight and less bloated system that would have real appeal, but that would also mean more work for the Linux Mint team and perhaps it wouldn’t really mean much for their audience.
This is what most people don’t understand for whatever reason. And exactly what I’m talking about.
Agreed
Thanks for understanding man.
I would also say “just install debian and then you can install cinnamon, uninstall Gnome, and bam, debloated Mint is yours.”
But outside of that, I’d back up important files and try uninstalling some shit, fuck it. Worst case scenario you have to reinstall (or since it’s a VM just snapshot it or whatever, you know what I mean, the thing where you can revert changes, like Jim Browning uses for scammers), live and learn. All the packages you listed so far should be no problem.
Thank you.
@gpstarman THIS is the reason I don't use Mint. I am otherwise the perfect candidate, more or less - I only want to USE an OS, not LEARN it, and all else being equal I much prefer using a GUI to a command line. But the big thing is I don't want problems that have to be solved in order to use my computer. I want Linux to be as easy to use as MacOS and when I say I don't want to do something a certain way, I don't want a bunch of momma's basement dwellers ganging up on me to tell me that's the only "right" way to do it (in truth that is seldom the case). Also, I don't want to be forced into the Canonical way of doing things (Ubuntu is turning into more and more of a shitshow with each new release, in my opinion).
The problem with Mint is that it tries to appeal to Windows users, and Windows users are used to having their machine come with a shit ton of preinstalled crap. Well I am not saying the Linux apps provided with Mint are crap, just that there are far too many of them, and most of them are things I would never use. Why they don't let you start with a minimal system and then let you add the software you want is beyond me. Well, unless you are trying to appeal only to Windows users who for some reason expect that.
And to those who say why not just start with Debian, well the problem with that is the minute you run something like Debian other Debian other users ASSume you want to LEARN Linux (I don't - REALLY, I DON'T) and therefore if you have any issues the first thing they do is say why didn't you read the man page or something equally stupid. I didn't read the fucking man page because man pages are written by PROGRAMMERS in a way that only other programmers can understand (with some rare exceptions). I don't want to have to read ANYTHING, I don't want there to be problems in the first place or if there are I want a GUI-based program that will fix them.
As an example I set up a media center PC to run Kodi and decided to try Debian with the XFCE desktop. I ran into a few issues but the big one was it didn't automatically mount my external hard drives. Well the hard drive names have spaces in them. And of course every solution I found was to use fstab, So I tried that, escaping the spaces in the drive name with backslashes, which works almost everywhere in Linux, but apparently not in fstab. And fstab is too stupid to just skip over a line it doesn't like; instead it stops the computer from booting normally. So when I rebooted the computer, it went into a black screen with a login prompt and NOTHING I could do after that would let me remove that line from fstab (because fstab is apparently a protected file in some way; even using sudo nano would not make it writeable). So I just started over from scratch, because again, I DON'T want to "LEARN" Linux, I just want to use it, and starting over took far less time then it would have taken me to figure out the "correct" way to do it.
But I still had the drive mount issue and I just wanted to mount the damn drives without using fstab (for obvious reasons - once burned...)- I know Ubuntu mounts USB connected drives automatically at boot, so why doesn't Debian? Anyway I asked in a forum and the one thing I requested is "PLEASE don't suggest fstab" and I explained why. Guess what almost EVERY response was? Both suggestions that fstab was the ONLY way (it isn't) or that I should have figured out how to resolve the inability to edit fstab using some obscure program I have never heard of before. (For anyone else with this issue, check out a little program called udevil; that was what worked for me as long as I set it up to run at each reboot, I have also since heard you can use some kind of gnome disk utility that also works under XFCE and will let you mount disks at startup). And boy do those people get pissed off when you don't just accept their "expert" advice even though they are telling you to do the ONE thing they were requested NOT to suggest (I had actually already tried most of what they had suggested anyway).
So that is the conundrum - you want a Linux distro that's not Ubuntu, but that is designed for people who couldn't care less about "learning" Linux any more than they want to "learn" MacOS or Windows. And from what I understand Mint is great for those people IF you can put up with all the random software they install by default; it's very seldom you run into weird issues in Mint (that also USED to be true of Ubuntu). Whereas in some other Linux distros (even Debian to some degree) some users think that half the "fun" is solving problems (I can't believe some people think that is fun!). But one big imp
Are you a mind reader, cause you said everything in my mind exactly as it is.
Infuriating stuff.
Thank you for understanding.
Also some other person suggested installing basic debian and then install Cinnamon DE. By doing this, you can get the perks of Cinnamon(updates, kernal updates, software manager etc…) and minimalism of Debian. I don’t know how true it is though. I’m gonna try it on a VM.