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Although we haven't walked through updating packages (we'll do that in 
Chapter 21
, 
Securing Your Server
), a situation that may come up later is one in which you have 
outdated kernels that can be cleaned with the 
autoremove
 option. These will appear 
in the same way as the example orphans I was shown in the previous screenshot, but 
the names will contain 
linux-image
. Take care with these; you should never remove 
outdated kernels from your server until you verify that the newly installed kernel 
is working correctly and the server doesn't exhibit any unwanted or unexpected 
behavior. Generally, you would probably want to wait at least a week before running 
apt autoremove
 when kernel packages are involved.
When it comes to other packages, they are generally safe to remove with the 
apt autoremove
 command, since the majority of them will be packages that were 
installed as a dependency of another package that is no longer present on the system. 
However, double-check that you really do want to remove each of the packages 
before you do so. You can always reinstall a package if you didn't mean to install it, 
and as an added benefit, if you reinstall a package that was marked for auto-removal, 
it won't show up in the output as an orphan package in the future.
As you've seen so far, there are a lot of options when it comes to managing software 
in Ubuntu, and as an administrator, you are able to choose the best possible method 
depending on the goal. Another special type of update is available, that can improve 
hardware support in a situation where your hardware is newer than your Ubuntu 
version, or provide compatibility for hardware that didn't previously have support 
available.