On Sun, 2016-02-07 at 00:39 +0100, Matus UHLAR - fantomas wrote: > On 06.02.16 16:52, Leslie S Satenstein wrote: > >Every few weeks I delete my Linux partitions on the SSD and I reinstall > > (another ) system. The reason I do it that way is simple -- I look at a > > lot of software, and it is easier to reinstall the system with what I want > > to keep, than to uninstall what I do not want to keep.And I stay with the > > 7.8gigs swap for my 8 gigs of ram. > > tried running cruft already?
What about: apt-get autoremove which removes what is not needed anymore by a debian system to run properly? It is even suggested when you update/upgrade/install new packages (at least, this is so if you work from the command line, but I imagine there is something equivalent with a fancy gui). I am using debian since debian potato and I strongly recommend to learn at least the basics of it before looking at other more exotic solutions. Debian has a wonderful package manager, just use it. One of the advantages of the command line is that one has to know what he or she is doing. Stability helps in keeping up with complexity (I am still using the same few commands and I didn't have to learn anything new so far, unless I was doing something new, that is, not done before). The easiest way I found to experiment is simply using more than one partition for the OS systems. In this way, you can keep one installation clean for work and the other (or others) can be used to make experiments (new installations/variations etc). I found this a really suitable test-bed, because in this way you are actually using the same hardware, isolating the parameters you are testing and the logs will contain all information you may need for comparing. An disk space, whether on hard disk or even ssd, is not a problem nowadays. Loredana
