One thing that I do is periodically look for “apt install” in /var/log/apt/history*.log. The history file has all of the apt commands that you have issued. For me at least, most are “apt update” and “apt full-upgrade”. I’m not so interested in what those commands have done, since they affect packages that have already been installed, typically during the initial installation. On my system, the history log file is rotated once a month, so I typically have a year’s worth of history available at any given time. I just pipe the result of “grep ‘apt install’ into a file so that I can keep track of things that I have manually installed. Anything that I’ve done that isn’t apt related typically leaves behind a tar file or sources or something like that.
Statistics: Posted by dr_bob — Tue Jan 20, 2026 2:25 am