What are the packages that comes default with Linux Mint Cinnamon that I can remove without any problems.

Linux Mint comes with lots of packages installed by default to give full experience to new users. But not everyone needs everything. In my case for example, I don’t need celluloid, pix, hexchat, hypnotix, rhythmbox, LibreOffice, etc,… Those applications has their own audience and Linux Mint including them is a good thing but I personally don’t want them.

Mini Rant or QA maybe?

I searched the internet a bit for the answer, on various forums, and subreddits. And All the people who asked this question got obliterated as far as I’ve seen. The common answers are:

if you remove the applications that came installed with Mint by default, it will cause Dependency issues.

If I remove an application and the dependencies shold be removed UNLESS some other application need those dependency, right? If that’s the case, why removing packages can cause dependency issues?

Why would you want to remove essential applications like LibreOffice, pix etc. ? (this question is asked in the sense of “what sane person would want to remove those?”)

Cause why not? Maybe I like GwenView more than Pix, maybe I don’t need office applications at all. Why this even matter?

If you want don’t want Mint’s default applications, then what’s the point of using Mint? Just use something like Ubuntu server or something. People need to realize that lot of people (at least me) using Mint for it’s System management (updates, apt source list, etc…) via GUI ability. Just because I want to manage my system with ease, that doesn’t mean I need everyt applications it offers me.

I honestly feel bad for the person who asked the question in the first place. They didn’t got the answers till the very end. All they got is Criticism and it’s not constructive one.

Why this kind of behaviour even exist?

P.S.: I’m using Mint inside VM for testing purposes. I don’t want my VM to take a lot of space. That’s why I don’t need lot of applications.

    • 𝕽𝖚𝖆𝖎𝖉𝖍𝖗𝖎𝖌𝖍
      2·
      4 months ago

      Not blindly.

      Use your package manager to remove whatever you don’t want. Your manager will either say, “can’t do it, it’s needed by X,” or will say “removing this will ALSO remove X”. If you want to keep X, then hit cancel. If you don’t recognize or care about X, go ahead.

      Package managers manage dependencies. This means it’s hard to remove stuff that are needed by programs you care about - as long as you read what the manager is telling you. If you remove something and blindly hit accept without at least scanning what else will be removed, yeah. You can accidentally delete stuff you don’t want to.

      On linux, there’s often little consequence. Even if you do accidentally remove Firefox, then just re-install it. You won’t lose any personal data.

      And most distributions simply won’t let you remove packages such that you can’t boot the system, or log in.

      You want to keep your session manager, window manager, your kernel. Whatever you’re using might let you remove the session manager, or DE; I doubt it’ll let you remove your kernel, or systemd, or any of those core systems – at least, not without a bunch of warnings.

      My final comment: if you try to remove something and the package manager says that it’ll need to remove a whole bunch of other things to do that… you might think twice. That’s a package a lot of other things need.