Slimming down MX

[Bierhundt]

There's a lot of apps/etc. that I'll never use on my MX laptop. I would like to remove them for reasons of space, but I don't want to break the system. The more space I have, the more brew recipes and brew videos I can download. I've got no need for Thunderbird, most of Libre Office (writer is the only one I use), the endless 'locales' (I only need US), Image magic, Gnome ppp, hexchat, and many others. I just need to know what ones are safe to "apt remove" without borking my install. Perhaps I should have started out with a minimal install (IF there is one), and built it up from there, but I'm no geek, so that's out for me.
Any ideas of what all is safe to remove and what isn't would be appreciated. I haven't any desire/need to use production apps, or things like that. I'm retired, and as long as I can use the internet with a small-ish browser and use my beer-making program (BrewTarget), I'll be a happy camper! I don't know if there's another browser out there that can give me as much as Firefox can (security/ad block -wise), and yet be considerably smaller in size, but if there is, Firefox would go as well.

[Eadwine Rose]

First of all.. how large is the hard drive you have installed this on?

Just saying: if you're picking up sand grains from a beach full of them, not much use unless you have a tiny beach.

I am not using most of MX's apps either, but they're not bothering anything, if you catch my drift.

[dolphin_oracle]

you should be able to remove any of the User applications, like libreoffice or thunderbird. I would leave mx-system and mx-apps alone, as those are used to pull in updates to mx and the mx tools respectively. If there are mx-tools you want to remove, its safe to remove mx-apps. Any mxtool still installed will still receive updates, you just won't automatically get any new ones down the road, if there are any.

[stsoh]

@Bierhundt
u can test slax, less than 300mb. latest slax-64bit-9.4.0, minimal apps, install what u need.

[Bierhundt]

you should be able to remove any of the User applications, like libreoffice or thunderbird. I would leave mx-system and mx-apps alone, as those are used to pull in updates to mx and the mx tools respectively. If there are mx-tools you want to remove, its safe to remove mx-apps. Any mxtool still installed will still receive updates, you just won't automatically get any new ones down the road, if there are any.

THX Dolphin Oracle, that's just what I wanted to know!

@stsoh You got me wrong, I don't want to change OS's, I plan to stick with MX and antiX. Besides, the last time I used Linux (few years back) Slax was based on Slackware, and my experience with Slackware didn't go well ...... I went directly to Libranet from there, and it had been Debian derivs ever since, other than an occasional side-tour of SuSe, Mandrake, Arch and others, but l always came back to Deb derivs.

[azrielle]

Or X-Slacko-Slim, available at the murga-linux.com website.
Roughly 165MB, helluva lot easier to use than Slax. It IS a Puppy derivative though...

[Adrian]

If you have a decent size drive, heck, even a 60GB SSD (you can pick those for $25 on Amazon) is PLENTY. Removing 500MB of applications you don't use is less than 1% of drive space, probably not worth your time. If you use more space than you have it's not because of the programs that come pre-installed on MX...

[Eadwine Rose]

^ My point exactly.

How could we find out again what partition blahblah (root, home, that stuff, can't remember the right wording here haha) taking up a lot of space?

[Bierhundt]

How do I find the 'locales' file to remove the excess ones that are un-needed, and is there a smaller secure/ad-blocking browser than FireFox?
TIA

@ azrielle - see my response to stsoh - I don't want a different OS, but thx!

@ Adrian - it takes much less time to update/upgrade if you don't have all those extra Mb's of things for apt-get to work on. If you don't need it, why keep it - that's my motto! As a retired old man, I have plenty of time to waste removing apps and programs I don't need -

Maybe it'll make me 'feel good' --- helping out the environment by getting rid of useless clutter or some such thing

[dolphin_oracle]

Code: Select all

sudo dpkg-reconfigure locales

I think it what you want.