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Cleaning up orphaned apt packages
As you manage packages on your server, you'll eventually run into a situation where 
you'll have packages on your system that are installed but not needed by anything. 
This occurs either when removing a package that has dependencies, or when the 
dependencies on an installed package change. As you'll remember, when you install 
a package that requires other packages, those dependencies are also installed. But if 
you remove the package that required them, the dependencies will not be removed 
automatically.
To illustrate this situation, if I remove the 
apache2
 package from one of my servers, I 
will see the following extra information if I then try to install something else:
Figure 3.4: Output with orphaned packages shown
In this example, I removed 
apache2
 (that was done before the screenshot was taken), 
then I went on to install 
tmux
. The package I was trying to install is arbitrary; the 
important part is the text you see in the screenshot where it says 
The following 
packages were automatically installed and are no longer required
. Basically, if 
you have orphaned packages on your system, Ubuntu will remind you periodically 
as you use the APT suite of tools. In this case, I removed 
apache2
 so all of the 
dependencies that were installed to support the 
apache2
 package were no longer 
needed.
In the screenshot, I'm shown a list of packages that APT doesn't think I need 
anymore. It may be right, but this is something we would need to investigate. As 
instructed in the output, we can use the 
apt autoremove
 command as 
root
 or with 
sudo
 to remove them. This is a great way of keeping our installed packages clean but 
should be used with care. If you've just recently removed a package, it's probably 
safe to do the cleanup manually.

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Managing Software Packages