When you uninstall a program on Ubuntu, does the software leave any residue?

Computer systems like Windows have tons of software residue that is left when an application is installed and subsequently uninstalled.

Does Ubuntu have the same problem? Would my 5 year old Ubuntu install run the same as the day of install (not counting some of the system upgrades) if I uninstalled all the software I had installed on it over the years?

Solution 1:

Ubuntu/Linux is set up in a differrent way.

Yes, traces are left behind -but- they do not impact the speed of your system.

On Linux libraries sometimes remain on your system. We call them orphans and there is a program called deborphan that removes them. But all you gain is a bit of space on your harddisk. Speed you will not gain. You get more speed by tweaking settings or by disabling services you do not use.

If you want a toolset that includes deborphan install Ubuntu Tweak.

Sometimes programs leave things there on purpose. Those tend to be settings files we manually edited. If you uninstall you have an option "--purge" that removes those while uninstalling; otherwise you are suppose to delete them your self. But again: these just take up space (and for that matter we are talking kilobytes not megabytes) and do not impact on your speed.

2 things related to speed: keep your / partition under 95% full and make sure your system does not need to swap alot. Those 2 are probably 2 main speed related issues.

Solution 2:

In addition to Rinzwind's answer, some program may leave profiles or files containing , for example, keys, passwords, names and things like personal data. Some of packets can ask you to confirm about keeping such files farther or don't keep anymore, some may not ask. It depends on particular application.