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Cleaning up packages?
(lemmy.ml)
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this post was submitted on 03 May 2025
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EDIT: More information provided. I disagree with the upvoted comment implying you should leave your system alone because you might break something. You're using Arch, and part of the reason to use Arch is understanding how you built and maintain your system. Understanding how to inspect your system and perform proper maintenance is a crucial part of that. Read and think carefully before taking any actions and make sure any important information is backed up before taking major actions. Without throwing too much further shade, I find it disappointing so many in the community would take that stance and discourage you from pursuing this further.
When I switched to Arch, I started a notebook in Obsidian with a bunch of different information in it, I have a section devoted to Maintenance. Here are a few things I've put in there:
Clean package cache with paccache: https://ostechnix.com/recommended-way-clean-package-cache-arch-linux/
Clean orphaned dependencies:
sudo pacman -Rs $(pacman -Qtdq)Additionally, you can run
pacman -Qeto list the packages you yourself have explicitly installed with pacman, orpacman -Qdtto list the packages that are dependencies of other packages. Usepacman -Qmto list packages not found in the official repositories (i.e., things installed through yay). This will allow you to review packages you may have explicitly installed in the past for some reason, but now find you no longer need.For yay, I'm unsure if I should be using
-Yc,-Sc, or-Scc. If anyone has more info with that, I'd appreciate it.For flatpak:
flatpak uninstall --unusedAnd for journals:
journalctl --vacuum-time 7daysThat's most of the "automatic" stuff, cruft that can be cleaned out with little to no consequence. Other than that, you'll just have to manually review what you have on your system.
If anyone has other commands or comments on the ones I provided, I'd be happy to accept further advice here as well 😃
In addition to this, or rather before, you can run
pacman -D --asdeps package_nameto mark a package as a dep. If it is no longer required by something else it will be removed with the above. This can be useful for things that are deps that you installed manually at some point for some reason.And remember that you can recover from anything, even removing base packages or bootloader ones with a live cd and chroot or using pacman with a different root with the
--root /mntflag to pacman.Otherwise if your system still boots it is just a matter of following the install instructions for whatever is not working like you did the first time.
Oh, that's some amazing info, thanks!
I had noticed this might be a problem when I was setting something up and tried to install a dependency that was already on the system. It informed me it was being set to explicit and I wondered if it might lead to a situation like that.
--asdepsalso works when installing something to immediately mark it as a dep. Can be useful for non dep packages if you only need it temporarily as it will be removed the next time you purge unused deps.