Purging old stuff off your comp

[TaoPhoenix]

General thread for deciding that "enough is enough" and removing stuff that maybe was your thang in prior years but no longer.

I deleted another 20-30 programs today (including I overshot and nuked my Adobe PDF printer, oops!) just to try to clarify what's on my rig. I have done a lot of trial experiments over the years, but unlike some of you hotshots, I just can't recall why some 70 programs even do anymore, so let's say I put 5 of them back, maybe twice a decade it's not a bad thing to just clean house. Heh a few reports have come in that my comp is starting to creak at the edges, so maybe somewhere in this cleanup I'll remove some ultra-obscure cross-dependencies/whatever and get a bit of performance back.

Edit: could be as much as 5-7 gigs worth of stuff, not "crap" because it got there for some whatever reason, but it's all just too much anymore.

[Paul Keith]

It's not a tablet related thread but welcome to the wonderful wonderful world of why I hate Tablet computers. Even with programs that uses checkboxes to uninstall, there's always that one program you haven't tried or have only recently installed but all that icon is making it too hard to drag and squint for that one right icon that you tend to accidentally click.

Also: This is IMO why all software need to have package managers.

[40hz]

Edit: could be as much as 5-7 gigs worth of stuff, not "crap" because it got there for some whatever reason, but it's all just too much anymore.

-TaoPhoenix (December 22, 2012, 09:44 AM)

It happens to all of us.

I recently DBan-ed and reformatted five almost fully loaded external hard drives which have been sitting on a shelf, unexamined and untouched, for over three years now.

It took a bit of "what the hell" to nuke approximately 1TB worth of "stuff" since I'm an info squirrel by nature. But I figured if I hadn't needed or missed any what was on them in over three years, it wasn't anything critical to my current life.

Once the initial wave of anxiety passed, I suddenly felt a sense of...I dunno...maybe something akin to liberation?

Maybe I lost something nuking those drives I'd rather I hadn't. But if so, I've already forgotten what it was.

And if I ever do remember, then at least I can say "Well, since it's already happened, it's one less thing to worry about."
 

Next step: going through and optionally purging those 200+ apps I have loaded on my iPhone - half of which I don't even know what they do any more. Bet when I'm done there'll be fewer than 30 remaining.

[TaoPhoenix]

It took a bit of "what the hell" to nuke approximately 1TB worth of "stuff" since I'm an info squirrel by nature. But I figured if I hadn't needed or missed any what was on them in over three years, it wasn't anything critical to my current life.

Once the initial wave of anxiety passed, I suddenly felt a sense of...I dunno...maybe something akin to liberation?

Maybe I lost something nuking those drives I'd rather I hadn't. But if so, I've already forgotten what it was.

-40hz (December 22, 2012, 12:42 PM)

Oh, it's def. liberation. I didn't have so many terabytes because all the apps were like 14 megs each. And yes, you definitely did lose something in the process. But life just marches on, and the really good ones will come back, and maybe you/I had a brilliant idea X years ago that you/I nuked, but maybe that's just a casualty of the march of time. I used to really value the Jack-of-All-skills mentality, but if you only spend 4 days on each one, it gets thinner and thinner.

I have an additional goal here - to try to clean up some cruft on my comp and get a little bit of performance back. I do think I'll get a few percent because I do think a few of the B-Grade programs were fighting each other for default preferences.

[Edvard]

Ooooh boy, do I hear you on that one.  Every year I get more Linux-savvy, the more I tend to umm... play.

I've got a kabillion packages installed that are probably obscure libraries for something I wanted to compile, but those are usually fairly minimal.  What's driving me nuts is my Applications menus getting longer and longer with stuff I KNOW I'm going to use again someday, so don't have the intestinal fortitude to actually wipe out.  Oh,and the custom icons and shortcuts. I made for many of them, with softlinks to God knows where just to make them run.  Same with my /opt directory, full of stuff I compiled and ran, then discarded but never did a 'make uninstall'.  THAT's scary ground to walk on.

I do keep a very organized home directory though; everything sits in ~/Downloads or ~/temp until I decide it's worth keeping or nuking.  If I can't decide, it probably needs a nuke. One of these days, Wheezy is going to land in Stable, and I'll have justification to backup/nuke/upgrade.  
The thing about wastelands is there's so much room for gardening...  

[Renegade]

Sigh... Digital packrats that we are...

I've got a bunch of drives sitting idly by... Too much of a packrat and too lazy to do anything about them. (They've been backed up even.)

I just installed a new drive on this computer - restored an image for a clean install - still have the old drive ready to boot off of... Can't let it go "just in case"... Which is a good thing at the moment because there are still things on it that I need to use and have to reboot for...

And then there are the external drives... and the NAS... and the optical media... and...

Not deleting it all quite yet...

[mouser]

I think at some point you are better off backing everything up and then starting with a fresh install of Windows, rather than doing major uninstallations of dozens of apps.

[Renegade]

I think at some point you are better off backing everything up and then starting with a fresh install of Windows, rather than doing major uninstallations of dozens of apps.

-mouser (December 28, 2012, 05:48 PM)

Hehehe! Just did that. Still in the process of reinstalling a lot of stuff though...