What's the good way to clean up the system (and is Bleachbit safe) on Ubuntu 14.04?

Question

I used Ubuntu 14.04 (Trusty Tahr) for about a year (actually upgraded it from Ubuntu 12.04 (Precise Pangolin)), and during the time I installed some packages, and removed some other packages.

Now I think it's probably time to clean up the system as it's likely several unused stuff is lying out there (both from the old 12.04 and the new 14.04), and I hope to have a cleaner system that works faster.

I found these two links:

• How to clean Ubuntu safely

• Cleaning up Ubuntu 14.10,14.04,13.10 system

Both links seem good, but when I came across to what they said about Bleachbit then one says yes, and one says no - a bit contradicting.

What should be done for this common task?

Solution 1

To remove any packages that aren't needed by the system:

sudo apt-get autoremove

The other answer for this question:

sudo apt-get clean

This just clears the package cache for downloading new packages, it will not uninstall any packages.

See: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/AptGet/Howto

Solution 2

Ubuntu tweak will be to your liking.

It has a "janitor" option where you can clear caches files, delete old kernels, delete orphaned .debs and more like that. But what gets removed tends to be a few MBs of software that is not longer used on your system but will not have interfered with what you normally do.

A crash of kate should be treated as such: search the crash online and see of there is a fix, otherwise you can opt to file a bug report against kate.

Solution 3

On Linux there usually is no need to clean your system, even after multiple updates. APT keeps tracks of which package installed which file and removes them when uninstalling a package.

Your system doesn't get slower if there are many packages installed (as long as you still have a reasonable amount of free disk space).

There is also no system wide registry as in Windows, but a lot of programs have configuration files in /etc. Usually it is better to not touch these files unless you know what you are doing. These configuration files are the only thing not deleted by APT when uninstalling a package (because you might want to use then again in the future). If you want to remove configurations files from uninstalled packages you can either call

dpkg --purge PACKAGENAME

for each package you want to remove or use

dpkg -l | awk '/^rc/ {print $2}' | xargs --no-run-if-empty sudo dpkg --purge

to remove configuration files of all uninstalled packages. However you should expect no speed up of your system.

Solution 4

To get rid of partial packages - sudo apt-get autoclean

Get rid of unnecessary locale data - localepurge

Get rid of "orphaned" packages - sudo deborphan | xargs sudo apt-get -y remove --purge

You can refer this article for more detailed information

http://www.ubuntugeek.com/cleaning-up-a-ubuntu-gnulinux-system-updated-with-ubuntu-14-10-and-more-tools-added.html.

Solution 5

Below are cleanup system tools

1. BleachBit

2. Ubuntu Tweak

3. GCleaner

4. Sweeper

5. Stacer: Linux Optimizer & monitoring open source

I got a vote list for above from here

And for removing unnecessary files follow below tools

1. baobab - GUI
2. ncdu - OUTPUT in CLI and also works remote servers via SSH.
3. cruft

Hope this helps you.

View more solutions

Comments

[xangua]

Clean what exactly? Unused packages for example, try apt-get autoremove

[artm]

clean up the system - if that's possible..

[Raphael]

That's probably not the answer you want, but still: have the OS, /home and your data on separate partitions. Then, just install a completely new system (keeping home/ and data); if you don't make too larger jumps, most configurations will still work as before. Of course you'd have to reinstall everything, but that's a part of cleaning up: install only what you need when you need it.

[Rinzwind]

@artm in this respect Linux is a lot better than Windows. We do not have a registry with bogus keys that slow down your system. If you delete a lot on Ubuntu you might have libraries that are no longer used BUT we are talking about files that are the size of a few -bytes- here. Not worth the time to me. Cleaning up your system in Ubuntu is generally removing software you installed and never used ;)

[artm]

@Rinzwind: Yeah you're right. I actually forgot about those windows-style system clean-up for a while. As I mentioned in the Q, it just happened to me that kate suddenly stopped working properly, so I started to have some doubt about the way I usually handle Ubuntu install/uninstall, and how to clean the system up as a whole.

[Rinzwind]

You will want this ubuntu-tweak.com @artm See the "janitor" option.

[redchief]

@artm use ubuntu tweak it contains a system janitor will help you exactly as you want

[artm]

I just tried sudo apt-get clean - nothing seems to be done though..

[Daniel]

sudo apt-get clean is what cleans out unused package stuff, so if that hasn't done anything, then you're already clean package wise.

[Daniel]

If you wanted to clear out stuff like old downloads, you'll have to do that manually, or find something like Ubuntu tweak or Bleachbit to clear out cache and history etc.

[Admin]

Please fix the broken link.

[Thomas Ward]

Note that Ubuntu Tweak is no longer maintained as of May 2016, according to the Project Page on Launchpad.

[PeterM]

localepurge might be configured to automatically run when using dpkg, so might be unnecessary to use it. To check this use localepurge --help

[artm]

that looks good thanks (didn't expect that there are so many, and Bleachbit is leading tool..)

[Xiaodong Qi]

Any alternatives to Ubuntu Tweak?

[Undefined Behavior]

Beware that there is a bug bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/apt/+bug/1615381 for autoremove and probably it will remove all kernels, include the current running kernel.

[labyrinth]

+1 for ncdu. I ran into an issue where my entire drive filled up. I'd used baobab in the past, and bleachbit helped a bit, but ncdu really drilled down fast to what files were taking up space, and it scans faster than any other tool. This was on 17.10, so still a very relevant tool.

[HattinGokbori87]

Using Ubuntu Cleaner with occasional autoclean, autoremove, clean commands. Works very well

[Matthew]

Tried ncdu, and it said I had 2.3 GiB used space, but glances says I'm using 18G, and I'm fairly certain 18 is much more accurate. And yes I ran from root directory. Actually, I ran ncdu as root as well and it showed even less space being used so honestly don't know what the hell is up with that program.

[Christophe Roussy]

@UndefinedBehavior note that this bug was fixed in the package apt - 2.1.18

[Christophe Roussy]

You can also do sudo apt-get autoclean