Spring - Time to clean house (Home)

General Discussion
21

9GB in .local
I would have a look inside .local/share … see what is using all that space … but be careful… you need most of what is in there.
It is safer to rename than to remove …eg
mv fileordirectory fileordirectory.hide
then if it crashes the system, you can simply move it back.

2 Likes
22

Large folder after the cleaning. System seems to be okay.

after cleaning
39M /home/easyt/.dropbox
67M /home/easyt/.cinnamon
134M /home/easyt/.cache
143M /home/easyt/.dropbox-dist
601M /home/easyt/.config
1.4G /home/easyt/.mozilla

3 Likes
23

I do all my updates using the gui manager on Mint. I have never checked as it runs in background whilst I work if this is automatically done

24

IIRC, synaptic doesnt use autoremove.

2 Likes
25

Thanks for the confirmation, next time I do a update will run a clean and see what it does

26

apt cleanis different to apt autoremove

4 Likes
27

Please explain more if you don’t mind sure others will gain more of an insite

28

Quick Comparison Table [1]

Command [1, 2, 3, 4, 5] Action Target Impact on Software
apt clean Deletes cached files /var/cache/apt/archives/ None; installed software stays
apt autoremove Uninstalls packages The entire system Removes unused dependencies
5 Likes
29

Never heard of that type of hidden file - with no permissions before. It’s an interesting idea.

1 Like
30

I never knew that.. I always equated them with dot files.
I cant see what use would be a file with no permissions … ie — — —. Nothing could use it?
Or does hidden files mean something different in Linux to what it means in Windows?

Maybe you could stash some keys or encypted files that where almost no- one would find them. When you needed them you could change their permissions - if you cauld figure out how to access them enough to do that. They would still have inodes.

2 Likes
31

Yep. apt marks all packages it installs as either automatic or manual. When it runs, it looks at all the automatic ones - packages that were only installed as dependencies of another package - and if no packages currently depend on them, it allows you to autoremove them en mass.

There’s one problem with that. If you try to install a package that’s already installed (e.g. by following instructions in some tutorial, etc.), apt will change it from automatic to manual and it will no longer be able to be autoremoved. If you see that happen, you can use apt-mark to set it back to automatic.

I have a bash function for installing packages that first checks if they’re already installed and skips them if they are to avoid this problem. When I do a clean install, I use it by feeding it with a package list from my previous distro to get most of what I need installed automatically.

5 Likes