Tips for cleaning your Linux system

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Article from Issue 297/2025
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File bloat can happen to anyone. These simple tips will help you keep your systems lean and responsive.

Linux is stable, fast, and versatile. But let's be honest: After a while, things get messy with temporary files, old packages, piled-up old kernels, and unused applications. Worse than the unused applications are the applications you install just to try and then remove without knowing what they'll leave behind.

Recently, I started noticing that my sleek Ubuntu system was feeling heavy, which made me realize it was time to liberate some disk space. As a long-time Linux user, I've faced these issues many times. The good news is that cleaning up your Linux system isn't hard. In this article, I'll show you some ways to declutter your system and reclaim disk space while keeping Linux running smoothly.

Remove Unnecessary Packages

Over time, as you install and remove software, your system can pile up unused packages, specifically, orphaned packages. Orphaned packages are software components that were originally installed as dependencies for other programs, but you no longer need them because the parent software has been removed.

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