best ways to find and remove unneeded packages/snaps and...

[Jeffrey Walton]

On Wed, Oct 22, 2025 at 3:52 PM Little Girl <littlergirl at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> M. Fioretti wrote:
> >Little Girl wrote:
>
> >> I believe that Snap cleans up after itself whenever it updates...
> >
> >That's not my experience, and I've seen several mention of the same
> >issue online, i.e. requests of how to clean up manually old snaps,
> >snaps cache etc.
>
> Yeah. Come to think of it, it's been sloppy once in the past for me,
> too. Here are my notes from when that happened on how to clean it up ,
> with "foo" being used as the example Snap name that we're cleaning up:
>
> Remove snaps
> 1. Display the snaps on your system: snap list
> 2. Display all the snaps on your system: snap list --all
> 3. Check if anything is using the foo snap: snap connections foo
> 4. Pick one:
>      * If you got a response, foo is in use and should not be removed.
>      * If you got no response on the connections to foo, foo can
>        safely be deleted: sudo snap remove foo

This is one of the biggest design failures with snap: it did not
integrate with existing native tools like Apt.

Microsoft learned that lesson a long time ago.  That's why Microsoft
added a Windows Update Server (WUS) and Windows Update to update the
entire system back at Windows 1998. (I believe it was Windows 98SE).

And surprisingly (or maybe not), Microsoft forgot the lessons learned
at Widows 8.  Windows 8 made users update the system with Windows
Update, and then made users update apps through the Windows Store.  So
the simple 1-click update was replaced with a multi-step process.  All
of a sudden users needed to be taught a different process after about
20 years.  It was a step or two backwards for security.

> >> grep "Install" /var/log/apt/history.log | awk -v date="$(date
> >> --date='-30 days' +%Y-%m-%d)" '{if ($1 >= date) print}'
> >>
> >> grep " install " /var/log/dpkg.log | awk -v date="$(date
> >> --date='-30 days' +%Y-%m-%d)" '{if ($1 >= date) print}'
> >
> >Thanks for this and the sudo apt tips, I was already doing many of
> >them but not all.
>
> Hopefully, the new one(s) will make some sort of difference.

Jeff