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.

  • tate@lemmy.sdf.org
    14·
    4 months ago

    Please don’t take this as one of the rude responses you refer to above - that is not my intent.

    Why do you want to use Mint in the first place? The only thing that distinguishes Mint from any other Debian derivative, is that they have made all these software choices for you, and you don’t have to do anything to get your system ready for you to be productive. It’s aimed at folks who don’t want to think at all about any of the concerns you have about customizing.

    If you don’t like the choices Mint has made, there is literally no reason to choose it. Start with a minimal version of Debian, and add whatever you want. The end result will be the same as starting with Mint and swapping things out. The only difference will be the address of your repositories.

  • TimeSquirrel@kbin.melroy.org
    4·
    4 months ago

    Why not tackle this from the opposite end, where instead of removing things and potentially breaking stuff, you add what you need instead? Debian is what Mint and Ubuntu are based on, and you can install a very bare bones system from the start.

  • Yozul@beehaw.org
    4·
    4 months ago

    Mint is actually really good about not having weird dependency chains, and even if it did uninstalling apps would warn you about it. That is a very strange thing for people to have said. It is perfectly normal and good to have some things you don’t want or prefer an alternative to and uninstall them. Default Mint is a great sane starting point for a complete OS, and I think their updater is the best in the entire Linux world, but it’s still Linux. You can still customize it to your heart’s content. Anyone who says otherwise is just being a creep.

    • Taleya@aussie.zone
      3·
      4 months ago

      There are a lot of linux people out there who are…very odd. I ran into a bunch who laughed at the thought of a gui terminal server - something i’ve been working with professionally for over two decades. Some really don’t understand jack nor shit and just parrot half-truths and poor knowledge like it’s gospel. “Don’t uninstall apps, you’ll break shit!!” No, uninstalling apps improperly breaks shit…

      /rant

      (Btw if i see one more person wail about how terrifying it is to run DD ima choke a bitch…)

      • schizo@forum.uncomfortable.businessEnglish
        2·
        4 months ago

        Fun DD story time, I guess.

        I, back when I was a very young and very dumb kid doing sysadmin things I shouldn’t have been doing, broke a production DNS server with it.

        I needed a boot floppy to install on another system, and the DNS box was RIGHT THERE, with a floppy drive.

        No big deal, just a simple dd command:

        dd if=redhat-boot.img of=/dev/hda

        Okay cool I have a boot floppy, wait it didn’t work? Weird. DNS is down? Also weird.

        In conclusion, lol.

        • gerdesj@lemmy.mlEnglish
          1·
          4 months ago

          It’s always DNS (unless it’s NTP).

          So now should we add dd to DNS and NTP? No. dd an image over something you shouldn’t is simply a daft thing to do and I’m sure many here use dd instead of a GUI or something more friendly that stops you from doing the daft thing. However, forgetting to consider DNS and NTP is when you cease to be a technician. DNS and NTP failure cause way more problems than they should at a casual glance.

          When I was a lad people used to riff on # rm -r ./ * destroying systems (lol). Bear in mind that . means current directory and … means parent directory and that all directories apart from / have both . and … entries. So rm -r should walk both upwards and then downwards. Even better, because Unix type systems can do this sort of thing, deleting the rm binary itself won’t stop the destruction. I’m not sure when the box would eventually panic, if at all. I think I’ll clone a VM and find out.

          rm these days won’t do that. It even has a --no-preserve-root option …

      • NaN@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
        0·
        4 months ago

        One of my big Wayland gripes is how hard it is to set up a terminal server. AFAIK the most recent gnome is the only thing that can do it and it’s session doesn’t persist over disconnects.

        • Taleya@aussie.zone
          1·
          4 months ago

          I actually had pretty good success using the ol’ RDP hack, both in mint and ubuntu. This is a fun guide once you get past the raging unearned elitsm “apparently this is a thing” yeah no shit idiot I used to run it on friggin’ NT

  • azvasKvklenko@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    3·
    4 months ago

    Traditionally on Ubuntu-based systems, those packages get installed as dependency of a meta package that pulls the entire desktop experience, for instance on Ubuntu this is ubuntu-desktop (the default GNOME experience), kubuntu-desktop (the KDE Plasma experience) and so on. I believe this won’t be much different for Mint.

    The consequence of uninstalling such package is removal of the meta package. You can totally do that, but then the dependencies (so the cinnamon desktop with everything that makes it Linux Mint) are due for autoremoval of no longer needed packages (so apt autoremove would remove it all) unless they’re marked as explicitly installed and needed by you. Unless they’re “optional” dependencies. It’s hard to tell precisely what will happen without access to actual Linux Mint, but in theory you can just cherry pick whatever you want from that big chunky meta package, or remove it all and only reinstall stuff that interests you.

    I personally wouldn’t bother and just set my default apps to my preference and if the app menu is too crowded I’d hide them using something like Alacarte (old school GNOME menu editor). That way you know that full system upgrades wont cause any problems, and you effectively replace apps as you desire.

    And it’s true that for lightweight system with only what I need, something like Debian or Arch would be much better. My experience is that usually modifying easy-to-use distribution is (while perfectly possible) more effort than building one from the ground up.

    • Fonzie!@ttrpg.network
      1·
      4 months ago

      They said, Debian Gnome comes with a stock application, a selfie application and a number of games pre-installed.

      • azvasKvklenko@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        1·
        4 months ago

        Yes, but it has netinstall and you can choose to only install the base system. You then boot to tty and apt install anything you want.

        Beware, it’s much harder to get complete OS this way, and even with working DE you may still miss something like userspace drivers, firmware, crucial services like NetworkManager, bluetooth etc. You’re on your own with finding out how Debian works

  • ArcaneSlime@lemmy.dbzer0.com
    2·
    4 months ago

    I would also say “just install debian and then you can install cinnamon, uninstall Gnome, and bam, debloated Mint is yours.”

    But outside of that, I’d back up important files and try uninstalling some shit, fuck it. Worst case scenario you have to reinstall (or since it’s a VM just snapshot it or whatever, you know what I mean, the thing where you can revert changes, like Jim Browning uses for scammers), live and learn. All the packages you listed so far should be no problem.

  • not3ottersinacoat@fedia.io
    2·
    4 months ago

    Celluloid, pix, hexchat, hypnotix, rhythmbox, LibreOffice all uninstall just fine without any issues. The only one of those I personally keep is Libreoffice.

  • verassol@lemmy.ml
    42·
    4 months ago

    I think you have a point there, but the reasons why Mint does not ship a streamlined version may be simply because the maintainers don’t want to bother with a whole different context to build, document and support.

    I do think there would be value in a less “batteries included” Mint. I disagree with people in this thread who claim the “whole purpose” of Mint is all the stuff it packs, because it goes far beyond the essentials. Mint develops a lot of GUIs for the user to be able to configure the system. I think just these plus the in-house Mint core apps would make for a sweet, lightweight and less bloated system that would have real appeal, but that would also mean more work for the Linux Mint team and perhaps it wouldn’t really mean much for their audience.

  • Fonzie!@ttrpg.network
    1·
    4 months ago

    It’s very simple in Mint, just right-click it in the menu, click Uninstall, and see if it warns you about dependencies.

    Thunderbird, Hypnotix, Hexchat and Firefox can be uninstalled safely for sure, I recommend against uninstalling the Update Manager and strongly recommend against uninstalling Python, as some other programs may/will depend on those

  • kbal@fedia.io
    1·
    4 months ago

    If you’re looking for candidate apps to consider removing, du -sh /usr/bin/* /usr/lib/* | sort -h is one quick way to find some that use significant amounts of space. On my system for example that points out things including blender, chromium, firefox, libreoffice, llvm, gcc, java, and pandoc as using a lot of space. It may not catch everything but it’s better than just guessing.

  • boredsquirrel@slrpnk.net
    0·
    4 months ago

    Just try it and make a list? sudo apt remove PACKAGE will prompt you to confirm and you see the dependencies before.

    Generally, 2 things:

    1. Deviating from upstream gives often undiscovered bugs
    2. Having a minimal core system (and the rest Flatpak for example) greatly improves stability and upgrades

    So these 2 are kinda opposite if you are on a “bloated” distro like Mint.

  • Frellwit@lemmy.world
    11·
    4 months ago

    celluloid, pix, hexchat, hypnotix, rhythmbox, LibreOffice

    Those applications uninstalled just fine without any dependency issues last time I tried Mint.

    If you’re unsure, make a snapshot of your current VM state (if your VM software supports it). Then just uninstall the junk you don’t need until Mint breaks. Restore snapshot, test some more, and so on. Those on real hardware should use Timeshift to create snapshots.

    Tip: Run sudo apt autoremove package in the terminal so you can see which dependencies that are removed.

    • palordrolap@kbin.run
      2·
      4 months ago

      Worth mentioning that apt generally asks if you want to continue after listing what it’s going to remove so this ought to be safe to do, because you can always say no.

      Caveat: It’s vaguely possible ultra-rare configurations might blast through without asking. If in any doubt, backup or take a Timeshift snapshot, or whatever your system does, before adding or removing software. Overkill? Maybe. It’d only really need to be the first time before you know what your local apt does.