(no subject)

[brin_bellway]

why doesn't Synaptic have a button for "uninstall this software *and all software that is here purely as a prerequisite for this one*"

okay, okay, I know why, it'd have to keep track of whether you've installed anything else since then that *also* needs the prerequisite, and maybe you've started using some non-Synaptic program that needs it, and a false positive on whether to get rid of a piece of infrastructure could end up disastrous

and yeah, it's not like my laptop is hurting for storage space

and yeah, if I really cared that much I probably *could*--when I'm testing out programs knowing that the likelihood any given one will work for what I need is fairly low--just keep copies of the lists of prerequisites-to-be-installed and go through and uninstall them individually if I don't keep the main program (especially if it's same-day)

(and god, maybe I will)

but it still kind of bugs me having the detritus of unused prerequisites gradually build up on a laptop the longer I use it, seems so *untidy*

---

(this post brought to you by trying to get a (very old) external webcam working on my laptop; eventually I gave up and borrowed Mom's laptop to use her built-in webcam)

Comments

[brin_bellway]

Don't get me wrong, I'm all in favour of information hoarding, but the hoard should be *organised* and *neat* and *consist solely of things that are there because I choose to have them there*. (Choosing an algorithm that automatically put the thing in the hoard counts as choosing it, as long as the algorithm is functioning as intended.)

[contrarianarchon]

I empathize with this 100%. The cruft of shitty software buildup on my computer is terrible! (I esp hated when I was trying to mod skyrim recently; I had to install multiple <1 purpose pieces of software. So annoying!)

[zenolalia]

Obviously it's not as convenient as a button, but you could run apt-get auto remove once you're done in synaptic?

Unless you're already familiar with that in which case this comment is itself a useless redundancy.

[brin_bellway]

Huh, okay, apparently there *is* a command for that and they deal with the false-positive problem by recommending you not use the command if you have any manually-installed software.

(I am not *100%* incompetent at command line, but I have enough other things I want to do that improving my command-line skill has never really been a priority. I've never sat down and made any systematic attempt to learn what my options are, merely picked up some things piecemeal over the years as they came up. I do sometimes learn after the fact that there was a command that *would* have been useful if I had only thought to check whether it existed.)

I'm pretty sure I *do* have some manually-installed software, so I probably would not dare to try autoremoval, but I am pleased to learn that it does in fact exist.