Packages to consider removing from default Desktop

Discussion really for Disco+1 unless we think some are very low impact.

both brought in by xorg metapackage.
bsdmainutils
x11-apps (like xcalc…)

anacron - started discussion here for moving more to systemd timers, https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel-discuss/2019-February/018242.html

kerneloops - site hasn’t done stuff for ages, still useful? http://oops.kernel.org/. Only brought in by desktop metapackages.

rsyslog - We log both to rsyslog and journal. For desktops I don’t think the extra logging gains us anything. I believe we would need to specifically exclude it to remove it.

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xnox wasn’t really in favor of rsyslog being removed.

I would talk to him.

IMO the additional logging adds wear and tear to an SSD.

@xnox Thoughts on dropping rsyslog from just the desktop? Or should we revisit for the full disto too?

Can vim be removed?

For CUI (Terminal,…) there is Nano.
For GUI there are editors preinstalled which belong to the correspondent DE (gEdit for GNOME, KATE for KDE).

VIM is just a

sudo apt install vim

away. And for emergency edits (broken internet) there is always Nano around. For me having VIM preinstalled just clutters the software lists for no benefit.

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Isn’t journald now use persistent storage ? That’s what causes wear and tear. And if I am not wrong jd was just forwarding log to syslog before bionic so that it can be viewed real time with gui.

Can vim be removed?

No. Vim, is like vi which all unix like systems use.

You are just a sudo apt get away. As vim is targeted to the professional, they will most likely know. You are right though that POSIX assumes its availability.

At least remove the icons in the grid. All the other Posix and GNU CUI programs don’t clutter the software lists (app grid, software center) either. Gawk, bc, dc…

vim is not default installed, only vim-tiny & vim-common
So nothing should be showing in the grid or overview regarding vim.

At least in Ubuntu Software there is the VIM icon listed in the installed apps section. As this is one of the first things to remove for me, I don’t remember if it was in the app launcher as well.

Is somebody testing the isos currently and can have a look?

I only use fresh 19.04 installs (weekly)
Vim does not show up in Ubuntu Software here, though it can be searched.
What you are seeing in Ubuntu Software is the presence vim.desktop which is installed via vim-common.
By default it’s (vim.desktop) probably worthless, whether it’s needed at all I don’t know. A gui version of vim (gvim) would install it’s own .desktop.

I don’t really think vim clutters, and it’s my go to editor for everything, feature wise nano is not even close to be equivalent.

You can apply the clutter argument to almost anything, but one of the things people love on Ubuntu is that it is ready to be used after installation of the OS and you don’t have to go around installing things that many people use (like vim).

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The idea we had is to not drop rsyslog, as it’s really needed to forward logs to remote rsyslogs in large deployments. But instead disable/reduce logging to disk. This way remote rsyslog logging is available on all Ubuntu systems, without having duplicate logs on disk without remote logging.

Also it would be nice to replace rsyslog, with rsyslog-ng which has native support to pull journald logs.

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Don’t quite see the point of including rsyslog by default then, but if we’re going to disable/reduce it’s logging to disk, my concerns are pretty much gone. I don’t see a compelling reason for Desktop to differ if that’s the call though.

There is also systemd-journal-remote.

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