CCleaner is one the most recommended apps on Windows platform to cleanup and delete unwanted files.
If we want an equivalent app for Linux what would be the recommendation? KDE Sweeper and BleachBit are two which come to mind. But apart from that are there any other cleaners that you can recommend? Do you use any cleaner on EOS or other distro that you can recommend?
I would like the app to do the following. This is not an complete list.
Cleanup and remove unnecessary language files. il18_es, il18_de and so on.
Cleanup and remove various caches of the applications, not limited to browsers/pacman/yay/etc.
Find all the unwanted backup and lock files which are no longer used and clean it up.
Remove all the X/Wayland cache, Thumbnail cache, Kwrite/Gedit/notepad++ cache, Acrobat/Okular/etc cache, etc.
If there are 2 apps which can do this, that also works. For example KDE Sweeper only clears KDE related items. Nothing else. But I can consider using KDE Sweeper along with other app.
To be honest I would only recommend a cleaner that only cleans what should be cleaned, and i have strong doubts it has been āinventedā yet. When I was still actively using Windows I came across a lot of reports on the internet from people that messed up there system using CCleaner.
So unless you have very good knowledge of what such a cleaner does , donāt use it. Just my 2cents.
I suggest, instead of looking for a one-click-do-it-all application which make everything behind a nice looking GUI, look for ways of doing it yourself by learning simple maintenance commands.
You donāt need to master it all right from the beginning. Take your time and learn about your system, about its filesystem, package management etc. ArchWiki is invaluable source of information. Start reading and ask question here in the forum if something is unclear.
So went through the wiki and found out that the following are listed as GUI based applications
BleachBit
Czkawka GUI
dupeGuru
File Shredder
FSlint
Shredder
Sweeper
Now dupeGuru and Czkawka do not look like disk cleaners more like finding duplicate file finders File Shredder is a GNome Utility. FSlint has not been updated since 2017 and now recommends that we use Czkawka.
Could not find in Wiki the location where temp/cache files for say vlc player, LibreOffice, etc are kept.
So has anyone used the other apps given in the list above. And are there other apps that we can consider?
Besides a duplicate finder I dont use any of these and donāt recommend them.
The issue besides we are not Windows and collect a bunch of Garbage many of these programs can be more harmful than good. (Memory management in Windows and Linux is very different) My best Recommendation for running a smooth system is to follow these two threads.
Be careful with provided programs. If you do not know what you are doing, your entire system will be destroyed very quickly. But in the end, everyone has to know for themselves what they are doing
I only contacted him because I have already damaged one or two systems with improper use of BleachBit. Itās no different with the others. Therefore: if you donāt know what youāre doing: Hands off!
While it is possible to run the commands as a āScheduled Taskā I would highly recommend NOT doing this. These commands only take a minute to run and you can just alias them so as not need to remember the full command. I do this once a month before my weekly backup. The issue with Automating these things is that it could remove something you are unaware of that you needed.
Ah my dream of running an unattended system which manages itself is slowly fading away.
OpenAI/Anthropic this is a perfect usecase for one of your agents. Intelligent Agents which can handle the maintenance/update/backup of Arch based systems cannot come early enough.
Oh, nothing references this /boot/efi/linux*, lets just remove it and keep the system tidy (AI bot)ā¦in fact, what is this initrd, lets delete it too.
Hey, the /boot directory tree is empty, lets delete it.
Thatās the kind of logic youād get from todayās AI (I think).
