On Fri, May 28, 2021 at 01:43:59PM +0200, l0f...@tuta.io wrote: > OK, here is my understanding of your situation. > > unattended-upgrades is not installed by default, so you installed that > package at some point because you were interested in applying upgrades > automatically.
More likely, it was brought in as a recommendation by some desktop environment. One may use "aptitude why unattended-upgrades" to find out why it was installed, or more properly, why it's not being marked for autoremoval at the current moment. > If you are sure not to use some optional package, then remove or even purge > it. Agreed. This is the preferred approach most of the time. However, if the package is marked as a *dependency* of some desktop environment, rather than simply a recommendation, then purging the undesired package may also try to remove the desktop environment metapackage. And some people panic when that happens, because they don't understand that a metapackage is not critically important. (And then it gets even more complicated when you consider autoremove, because removing the placeholder metapackage may free up various other pieces of the desktop environment -- ones that actually *do* something -- to be marked for autoremoval. And that's not desired.) (Personally I solve all of that by disabling autoremoval. But that's just me, and most people seem to like it.)
