Method to Automatically Remove Unneeded Packages?

Ask Fedora
1

The title kind of says it all… I’m looking for if there is a method by which I can automatically identify unnecessary, unneeded, and unused packages; e.g., I noticed during a recent update that libva-intel-media-driver was being updated, but my system has no need for anything Intel related because I am pure AMD.

Thanks for all the help!

3

Not an automatic way but some things to check.

To see what autoremove would get rid of
dnf list --autoremove

User installed packages sorted by date
dnf repoquery --userinstalled --qf="%{installtime} %{full_nevra}\n" | awk '{print strftime(" %F-%H:%M:%S ", $1)"\t" $2}' | sort -r -h

4

Also not automatic, but rpmreaper will help to identify “leaf” packages that no other package depends on and which can (probably) be removed without much consequence. It also has a quick way of getting summaries of what various packages are as you navigate through them (press the i key).

1 Like
5

This is a cool tool Thanks!!!

6

I “autoremove” pretty regularly and think that’s a great suggestion; I also think rpmreaper is a cool tool and need to learn more about it.

I’m not sure either of those suggestions actually addresses what I’m getting at, so I don’t think I was clear…

In my mind, I’m imagining (read: hoping) there is a tool that will use my current system configuration and identify those packages that are installed that aren’t necessarily “compatible.” For example, the tool will identify that I don’t have any Intel parts and recommend all the Intel packages that were installed at any point for removal.

7

Hardware firmware is installed by defaiult. In that way it makes it possible to ungrade your hardware and keep working. It also makes it possible to move the disk to a new system.

As the packages take up little space on my disks I’ve not been interested in remove these types of packages.

8

I’m pretty sure unnecessary firmware was being put into initramfs (longer generation, slower boot); I think omitting through dracut.conf would work vs removing packages, but I did this on an all-Intel laptop:

sudo dnf remove 'amd-gpu-firmware' 'nvidia-gpu-firmware' 'atheros-firmware' 'mt7xxx-firmware'

I was surprised to see Anaconda installer stuff present post-install, and don’t do anything with virtualization (iirc there’s a lot of unnecessary dependencies):

sudo dnf remove libvirt-client anaconda-*
9

what if you did it with an excludes drop in file …

/etc/dnf/libdnf5.conf.d/90-unwantedpkgs.conf 

[main]
excludepkgs="akmod-nvidia, akmod-nvidia-390xx, akmod-nvidia-470xx"

and then just used something like ..

#!/usr/bin/env bash
UNWANTEDPKGS="$(sed -e '1d' -e 's/"//g' -e 's/,//g' -e's/excludepkgs=//' /etc/dnf/libdnf5.conf.d/90-unwantedpkgs.conf)"
for pkg in ${UNWANTEDPKGS}
do
  echo "${pkg}"
  dnf --exclude="" list --installed "${pkg}"
done
10

Both of those ideas sound interesting… Since it looks like I’d be setting up my own scripts and/or altering the way dnf behaves, it sounds like there is not an already existing tool like that which I described.