[SOLVED] Seahorse and its uselessness

[Valsodar]

I noticed 18.3 has a program called Seahorse and it seems to be some kind of a "password and keys" manager. I wonder - what will happen if I uninstall it? I've been using 18.3 for 9 months already and for that time I didn't have to use Seahorse at all. I tend to uninstall software I don't need. If the root password is stored elsewhere, that would be great cuz I'll be able to get rid of a useless program.

[gm10]

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$ apt show seahorse
[...]
Description: GNOME front end for GnuPG
 Seahorse is a front end for GnuPG - the GNU Privacy Guard program -
 that integrates to the GNOME desktop. It is a tool for secure
 communications and data storage.  Data encryption and digital signature
 creation can easily be performed through a GUI and Key Management
 operations can easily be carried out through an intuitive interface.

It's not installed by default, so if you didn't install it manually it probably came as some software's dependency. At a command line run

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apt purge seahorse

and if it wants to remove any additional packages it will ask you for confirmation first. Make sure it's nothing you are using.

[Valsodar]

apt purge seahorse displayed a bunch of packages about which the system said they're no longer necessary or used, so I used sudo apt autoremove seahorse which cleaned nearly 200 MB of space (the purge command would only remove the program itself but not its dependencies). I performed a system reboot, just to make sure nothing was broken and it booted up fine without errors.

Thanks, gm10.

[gm10]

You can also combine the both:

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apt autoremove --purge

Since I'm lazy, my modified apt (but not yours) even has apt purgeall, I use that a lot. You think that's something I should suggest for inclusion in the general tool?

[Valsodar]

It seems you're more advanced than me, so forgive me for the stupid question, but what's the point in combining autoremove with purge? Autoremove removes everything - both the program and its dependencies.

[gm10]

It seems you're more advanced than me, so forgive me for the stupid question, but what's the point in combining autoremove with purge? Autoremove removes everything - both the program and its dependencies.

(auto)remove does not remove configuration files (if any). purge, on the other hand, does. System-wide configuration files that is, never your user-specific configuration.

That's why you preferably always use purge instead of remove to get rid of a package you are sure you won't need anymore. remove is what you use when you think you may want to re-install the package at a later time and thus want it to leave its configuration files behind.

[Valsodar]

I understand now. Thanks again.