Motivation:

I want to remove applications I do not use to speed up my package processing tasks like dist upgrades, regular updates, but also for saving disk space and other reasons. I know this is a complex topic so first I will ask my question and second I will give some answers I already found out.

Question:

How do I find out which package I did not used at all? For example I always use the VLC so I could remove totem package. (Which I could have been used some day, yes.) Of course package dependencies could force me to have programs installed which I will never use.

Notes:

• Find the packages which consume much space via synaptic:

  Select "Status" in lower left, select "Installed" in upper left, sort column on "size" in upper right. Then you can decide which big packages you really need.

• Use aptitude autoremove

• Use ubuntu-tweak's Janitor for removing old kernel packages, old configs, apt-cache entries, etc.

• Manually search for applications for a given task that you usually solve with your standard app. E.g. Movie player, Music player, Office program, Browser etc. (BTW: this is what I want to be helped with my question)

• When removing packages I always favour "apt-get purge" over "aptitude remove --purge" as aptitude often will also remove essential packages due to package dependencies. E.g. when removing "evolution" (as I use thunderbird) aptitude wants to remove also "ubuntu-desktop" and 756 other packages as well, while apt-get just removes evolution and its helping pacakges like evolution-common.

• Ubuntu lense gives me most recent used applications which are candidates for keeping :)

• Employ deborphan as I read in this related answer: How do I clean up my harddrive?

• I should certainly keep essential packages: Keep only essential packages

• This question is pretty much a duplicate of How to see what installed packages I have never used for cleaning purposes but covering only few aspects. However one answer suggests to use a program called unusedpkg but the link seems down.

• There is also a program called Kleen http://code.google.com/p/kleen/ but it won't compile in 11.10. However I hacked it to compile but the results are unusable, as for example the g++ package was marked as not used for 203, but actually I used it seconds ago for compiling Kleen itself ;) So don't use this tool.

• On http://wiki.debian.org/DebianPackageInformation I read the the package popularity-contest will produce log files with usage statistics. Unfortunately I didn't enabled the popularity contest so I can't find this log file.