Do you know what the command would be to generate an equivalent file for what's currently installed ?FYI- The OS downloads folder contains a .info text file which shows all default installed packages. Each OS release has a .info file.
I assumed 'dpkg -l' but when I compare the two I see about 650 packages supposedly installed by myself and, while that might be right, it's far above the number of 'apt install' I have actioned.
Using 'apt list --installed' I see about 2,200 packages installed in total. Removing the 'automatic' gets me to around 430. My own log parsing effort shows about 90 which seems mostly correct.
The two challenges in any comparative effort are having 'then' and 'now' data representing the same thing, being comparable, and having enough information to allow dependencies to be excluded, leaving only the high-level package names which were used in 'apt install' commands.
Unless you have both it becomes a manual task of going through hundreds of packages to identify the 80% you don't care about and the 20% you do. All the comparative methods I tried had this problem which is why I took to parsing the log files because that lists everything I have done post-install. But, as noted, that will not show everything after log file rotation results in removal.
Statistics: Posted by hippy — Tue Apr 23, 2024 10:26 am