Only a couple of the suspect packages led, when asking to purge them, to the revelation that some important packages (apps, really) depended on them. Still, having been able to clean up the mess is much better than nothing. Sadly, I still don’t know exactly how the mess was created in the first place and probably never will. It took about 90 minutes, involving about 30 sudo apt-get purge pkg_name, each of which resulted in the removal of 1 to 5 related packages. I have now cleaned up the mess to a satisfactory extent. Following all the great responses below, here is a summary of the main points that were most useful to me, along with my final results. Or is there something else I don’t understand? Is it simply because apt autoremove doesn’t do a recursive search through the dependencies? If so, is there a way to force it? I tried with the -purge option (which doesn’t seem to be documented anymore but was mentioned in a post in this forum as recently as May 2020) and it came back with zero packages to be removed. (I checked with a search through all the Synaptic logs.) It is a dependency for libkf5waylandserver5, which was never installed, and libkf5waylandclient5, which was among the 130 installed for kdeconnect but is only a dependency for 17 other various packages that are not currently installed and never were. they are not a dependency for something else, or they are a dependency for a package that is not even installed.įor example: kwayland-data was left in place. I’ve started checking these (using apt rdepends pkgname) and, so far, I’m seeing only packages that were left in place without an apparent reason, i.e. So I compared (by lining them up side-by-side in Calc) the list of the 130 originally installed packages with the list of the 67 packages that were removed just now, in order to identify those that were not.

I understand that some of the remaining packages may have become a dependency of one or more other packages that I installed later. Then I ran sudo apt autoremove but that removed only 67 of the 130 packages that had been installed as dependencies for the two initial packages. I decided to uninstall the packages kdeconnect and indicator-kdeconnect, since I had not used them for over a year. I trust that it is and I run it from time to time.

There have been many posts about ‘autoremove’ and I’ve read several (mostly among the ones from the past couple of years).

Sudo apt autoremove php