pacman-debloating-list

A simple Bash script to facilitate finding useless packages on Arch Linux.

By default, pacman -Qe only displays a plain list of installed packages. In contrast, this script:

• Displays a table with all explicitly installed packages, along with their groups and descriptions.
• If all packages in a group are installed, it will only show a single row representing the group.

This significantly increments the signal:noise ratio, by reducing the mental effort of checking packages with obscure names or the packages belonging to common package groups (base, base-devel, xfce4, etc.)

Requirements / dependencies

The expac package is required. Otherwise, there are no requirements or dependencies outside of a basic Arch Linux install.

One time usage

If you want to use it one time, just copy and paste the contents of the file pacman-debloating-list to your terminal.

Installation

To install it permanently, you can use the PKGBUILD attached to any of the releases in the releases page. Alternatively, you can install it manually by downloading pacman-debloating-list to /usr/bin (and giving it executable permissions through chmod +x).

Then, run the following command in a terminal window to execute it whenever you want: pacman-debloating-list

Sample output

(ALL)                            base             (All packages in the group are installed)
(ALL)                            base-devel       (All packages in the group are installed)
(ALL)                            texlive-most     (All packages in the group are installed)
(ALL)                            xfce4            (All packages in the group are installed)
aircrack-ng                                       Key cracker for the 802.11 WEP and WPA-PSK protocols
alsa-utils                                        An alternative implementation of Linux sound support
broadcom-wl-dkms                                  Broadcom 802.11 Linux STA wireless driver
catfish                                           Versatile file searching tool
cdrtools                                          Original cdrtools supporting CD, DVD and BluRay burning
chromium                                          A web browser built for speed, simplicity, and security
create_ap                                         A shell script to create a NATed/Bridged Software Access Point
cups                                              The CUPS Printing System - daemon package
dconf-editor                     gnome-extra      dconf Editor
dosfstools                                        DOS filesystem utilities
evince                           gnome            Document viewer (PDF, Postscript, djvu, tiff, dvi, XPS, SyncTex support with gedi>
[...]
xorg-xinput                      xorg-apps  xorg  Small commandline tool to configure devices
xpdf                                              Viewer for Portable Document Format (PDF) files
xsane                                             A GTK-based X11 frontend for SANE and plugin for Gimp.
xscreensaver                                      Screen saver and locker for the X Window System
youtube-dl                                        A small command-line program to download videos from YouTube.com and a few more sites