How can I remove old linux-images when installing new kernel updates? [duplicate]

Why aren't old linux-images removed when installing new kernel updates?

Why should they get removed? To the system, there's no reason to do so. They can happily co-exist and if you are experiencing boot problems with the new kernel, you'll be happy that the old one didn't get removed.

But do I really need the whole history?

I only keep the old kernel until I'm sure the new one works fine. Updates usually should improve things, so running old kernels isn't advisable.

You can use Ubuntu Tweak to remove old kernels in an easy way and to do many other useful things. Here is an article explaining some of its features.