Hello all,
A week or two ago I my upgraded my old laptop from 16.04 LTS to 18.04 LTS by following the directions in the 18.04 final release announcement (Ubuntu MATE 18.04 LTS Final Release | Ubuntu MATE). It all went swimmingly except for a bit of cognitive dissonance near the end when I was notified that some largish number of installed packages are no longer supported by Canonical, but that I could still find support in the community. Since then I've also been notified when apt-getting things that:
The following packages were automatically installed and are no longer required:
apt-xapian-index gir1.2-gmenu-3.0 libgnome-menu-3-0
libqt4-help libqt4-scripttools libqt4-test
libqtassistantclient4 libxapian30 python-apt
python-aptdaemon python-aptdaemon.gtk3widgets
python-attr python-automat python-bs4 python-click
python-colorama python-constantly python-cups
python-debian python-defer python-dirspec
python-html5lib python-httplib2 python-hyperlink
python-incremental python-lxml python-olefile
python-pam python-pil python-piston-mini-client
python-pyasn1 python-qt4 python-qt4-dbus
python-serial python-sip python-twisted-bin
python-webencodings python-xapian
python-zope.interface python3-blinker python3-jwt
python3-oauthlib python3-piston-mini-client
python3-xapian software-center-aptdaemon-plugins
Use 'sudo apt autoremove' to remove them.
I did a bit searching around and discovered the ubuntu-support-status command which tells me:
You have 661 packages (27.6%) supported until April 2021 (Community - 3y)
You have 1605 packages (66.9%) supported until April 2023 (Canonical - 5y)
You have 2 packages (0.1%) supported until April 2021 (Canonical - 3y)You have 2 packages (0.1%) that can not/no-longer be downloaded
You have 128 packages (5.3%) that are unsupported
So I'm feeling there must be some cleanup required, but I don't want to break anything. Did I miss a step? Is this normal? Can I safely just do sudo apt autoremove, and is that all that's required? It's been a long while since I've done anything but a fresh install of a Linux distro and I'm afraid I don't know what the best practices are. Thanks for any help, and thanks to everyone involved in maintaining this great distro!