[vox-tech] Do Apt GUI's Clean?

[Alex Mandel]

On 03/24/2011 09:33 PM, Bob Scofield wrote:
> There have been GUI's for apt such as Adept, Synaptic, and now there 
> are "update managers."  I haven't used them very much.  I use aptitude.  
> Aptitude and Apt-Get have the "clean" and "autoclean" commands.
> 
> While I have not seen autoclean do much for the last couple of years, clean 
> really makes room.  After a recent install my system went from being 38% full 
> to being 30% full after executing clean.
> 
> Do the apt GUI's have a clean feature?  If not, it would seem to me that those 
> who use them should occasionally use the command line to clean their systems.  
> Is that right?
> 
> On I side note, some years ago Karsten Self did some posts here on why 
> aptitude was better than apt.  I notice that aptitude does not come on the 
> initial installs of the most recent version of Ubuntu and Kabuntu.  You have 
> to use apt-get to get aptitude.  I thought this strange.
> 
> Thank you.
> 
> Bob

I have a guess about why aptitude isn't available by default anymore.
Synaptic and the other Ubuntu Gui tools are front ends to apt-get so
that system would automatically get more attention. Point 2 is that the
database of packages is different between apt-get and aptitude. You can
easily hose a system by mixing the use of both, especially doing removal
with one will confuse the other. So maybe it was to keep newbies from
themselves.

As for the equivalent to apt-get autoremove in Synaptic look for the
Status button and then "Installed (auto removable)". Another big way to
save space if it's tight is to open the preferences and change your
package cache settings and deleting your cached package files.

I happen to find sorting by size of install and browsing through the
various status filters in Synaptic an easy way to find stuff I just
don't need.

Thanks,
Alex