When an application is installed many dependencies may be installed at the same time, but when the application is uninstalled, even if purge is used, only the application is removed and none of the depencencies. For example, I installed Apper to try out and 8 dependencies were also installed, when I try to uninstall Apper none of the dependencies are removed. I've checked the man pages for apt-get and dpkg and could find nothing that looked relevant, Muon doesn't seem to have anything relevant either. Surely, there's some way of doing this.
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Have you tried debfoster? -
Trywhich should remove packages that are no longer needed by other packages.Code:sudo apt-get autoremove
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Thank you james147. This is something that I should have known, but my brain is not working today.
ronw, the debfoster website says that debfoster has been deprecated since 2006, anyway autoremove is easier. Thanks for the suggestion.Comment
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As a note, the autoremove functionality is available from the Muon Package Manager as well. Simply going to Edit -> Remove Unnecessary Packages will mark all auto-removable packages for removal, and show you a preview of the packages to be removed in the review screen.
The reason that autoremoval is not done by default when removing/purging packages is that, well, sometimes APT autoremove isn't perfect and will remove the dependencies of the removed package that are still useful or may be used on their own entirely. As an example, the sni-qt package in my screenshot contains a status notifier adapter for pure Qt apps, (the new system tray spec KDE and Unity implement) and is marked for removal because at one point I removed the Skype package that brought the dependency in. Muon has to take the conservative route by default so as to not automatically remove things it shouldn't, but it gives you the opportunity to use the autoremove capabilities if you are a bit more of an "advanced" user and know what you're doing.
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