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.

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.

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.

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.

celluloid, pix, hexchat, hypnotix, rhythmbox, LibreOffice

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.

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

Celluloid, pix, hexchat, hypnotix, rhythmbox, LibreOffice all uninstall just fine without any issues. The only one of those I personally keep is Libreoffice.

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.

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:

1. Deviating from upstream gives often undiscovered bugs
2. Having a minimal core system (and the rest Flatpak for example) greatly improves stability and upgrades

So these 2 are kinda opposite if you are on a "bloated" distro 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.

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.

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.

@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 impediment to Linux adoption is you still have the old fart Linux users that haunt the forums and just don't understand that things aren't like they were 20 years ago, that most people don't want to struggle with an operating system nor search half the Internet in search of solutions, and that being "spoon fed" answers is something they now expect (especially now that AI's do exactly that, even if they are sometimes wrong). There ARE users that DO enjoy that sort of problem solving, just like there are people who enjoy tinkering with cars even though most of us just want to drive them and not have them give us problems. The people who enjoy getting into the guts of an operating system or a car will always be in the minority, and the rest of us kind of hate them when they talk down to us in a condescending manner or act like we just don't want to put in whatever they think is some required amount of effort (no, we really don't, because it shouldn't be difficult in the first place!).