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Cleaning up Xenial

Cleaning up Xenial

The folks at Canonical have created a very nice distribution of Linux named Ubuntu. This distro is used everywhere and while folks love this OS there's a lot to hate about it.

Recently I've once again picked up my crusade to build a home Lab and starting deploying Ubuntu Xenial (16.04) to my servers, previously they were running Trusty (14.04). Post-deployment I discovered the base image from Canonical comes with a couple of extra bits installed by default which I didn't need, want, or ask for.

These following packages are installed by default without any way to remove them:

  • Snappy
  • LXC
  • LXD

While I don't mind these things being installed when the package is listed at install time or when someone runs apt-get install ${SOME_PACKAGE_NAME} I do mind the fact they're installed by default and there's no choice in the matter.

So to keep the system minimal we need to clean these packages up. To do this, simply run the following command.

apt-get remove --purge snap* lxc* lxd*

It's that simple, there are around 80MiB of savings with these packages purged and removing them will keep a whole host of processes from ever starting which means there's less happening on the system "just because".


If you want to keep things simple and remove these bits follow up on the following launchpad bug and voice your opinion:

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