[Other] Program randomly appeared out of nowhere

[Mantas]

Hello,

I'm posting just to satiate my curiosity. After booting up my laptop today, out of nowhere I got something called ImageMagick (Color depth=q16). A fairly old school looking program for image manipulation.

Best I could find out about it is that it's a dependency for some core function of Ubuntu, but when I uninstalled it, it didn't prompt me saying that it was a dependency for something. The only dialogue box I got was that it was dependent on a similarly named package with ImageMagick and Ubuntu in said name. The program was not present after the fresh install of Kubuntu 20.04 nor have I installed anything that would require any sort of image manipulation. Closest thing would be LibreOffice suite (not through Snaps), specifically Draw, but it was installed a while ago. Last thing I did yesterday was wipe my favorites menu, because I never added LibreOffice to favorites, yet I couldn't remove it from favorites.

So, how and why did it get on my system? I just find it a bit weird and hopefully I didn't break anything by uninstalling it.

Cheers.

[Don B. Cilly]

ImageMagick is installed as default in almost all *buntu distros nowadays. It is really useful by itself (CLI) and a lot of applications/scripts use it.
I find it absolutely wonderful, actually

I just wonder how you "got it out of nowhere" though. Did it pop up on your screen shouting "You have been pwned!" ;·)

[Mantas]

No, it just appeared in the applications menu when it previously wasn't there, so I got confused.

Nothing against it mate, I just personally don't need anything like that.

[claydoh]

imagemgick is a core component for most everything that displays and manipulates images and the like. It definitely is pulled in by Libreoffice, among many other possibilities. Kipi-plugins (used by Gwenview, optionally, and Digikam)
It is probably marked as a 'recommend' as opposed to a 'depend' in the packaging, which would not cause the parent to be uninstalled iirc. Normally, this is used programmatically via other GUI tools, or via the command line (without any GUI)


As to why it popped open at boot, that is probably an artifact of a corruption or something along those lines in the desktop session the last time Plasma shut down. The default setting is to restore the previous session at the next login, and imagemagick somehow got stuck in there. it is rare, but this does happen with programs sometimes. One way to clear this, if it continues, is to switch the desktop session settings via System Settings to NOT save things for one login cycle and see if that clears it. Worst case is to add the program to the blacklist section, The actual command to bring up this gui is called simply display. which is what you would enter on the blacklist section if this is needed.
Calling display with an image file opens that image, without the gui part, which makes me think a program was using that command at some point when a log out happened and it incorrectly was included in the saving of the desktop session.

[Mantas]

That actually explains it well, thank you.

If I recall correctly, I did change it to start a new session every time, as that's what I've always preferred. No matter though, I'll get it back on and hide it. Nowdays it's just the frustration of using any new device (mainly phones) or system and it comes pre-loaded with a bunch of bloat. While this isn't bloat, my brain just screams delete every time I see something that I feel like is unneeded for me. Though overall, Kubuntu had nothing really that I didn't want and is a pleasant experience and a good introduction to Plasma.

[GreyGeek]

sudo apt-cache rdepends imagemagick