How do I list all installed programs by users?

Question

(If you find any errors in my english, excuse me and please correct them)

I know that there is another question: "How do I list all installed programs?".However there are a lot of programs on Linux mint and I only want to know wich programs that I have installed because I don't want to store programs that I will not longer use.

If possible, How do I list all installed programs from a given date?

EDIT: In windows you only need to go to Control panel -> Programs -> Uninstall a program and Windows will show you all programs currently installed.

Another possible way is to open "Program Files" or "Program Files (x86)" and check all folders into it. My question is, How I can do anything like that in linux? I think that the best solution is listing all binaries available on the $PATH, sort by date and check all binaries added after the day when I installed Linux in my computer,or type this command: "history | grep install". My question is if there is another way to do this less error prone (You can install programs with Synaptic, but then "history | grep install" could not work and , in the other hand, some binaries could haven't the date setted correctly (Unlikely event)).

I hope you can understand what I want

EDIT 2: This answer answered my question: https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/21057/203214

There is generally no way of listing manually installed programs and their components. This is not recorded anywhere if you didn't use a package manager. All you can do is find the binaries in standard locations (like Chris suggested) and in a similar way, guess where some libraries or some manual pages etc. came from. That is why, whenever possible, you should always install programs using your package manager.

If only Linux developers will allow users to do this in the future...

Anyway, thank you all for your answers :)

Answer 1

check /var/log/dpkg.log

But it's better to use deborphan for finding unnecessary packages.

DESCRIPTION deborphan finds packages that have no packages depending on them. The default operation is to search only within the libs and oldlibs sections to hunt down unused libraries.

Answer 2

You didn't mention which distribution(s) you are using, but in centOS or Fedora you could do:

rpm --query --all --last,

while in Debian or Ubuntu you won't get as "clean" of an answer.

One approach is looking through dpkg.log files, like this for the current log:

grep " install " /var/log/dpkg.log,

and this for the previous log:

grep " install " /var/log/dpkg.log.1

and archived logs with this:

zgrep " install " /var/log/dpkg.log.2.gz and so on for each archived log file.

Answer 3

Since you mention this question already, you are certainly aware of its answers, and I am not sure what you actually want.

I don't want to store programs that I will not longer use.

For all distributions that I know of software is delivered in packages, and if you don't want a package, you have to deinstall it through the distribution software manager. However, other packages may depend on it in which case most package managers won't let you remove it.

If you want to remove software that is part of a package that you want to keep in principle but you want to remove parts of it: this is generally neither intended nor supported. Nor is it recommended. You have to do this manually. Things to keep in mind: Upon update of the package in question the complete content will be restored, including what you removed manually; same with package repair. Moreover, if some other system tool xyz you never thought of depends on what you want to remove, then it breaks; in the worst case you end up asking a question here of the kind why does xyz not work, it used to work before which will likely be closed as off-topic. Thus, if this is what you have in mind - please don't. Spare yourself the trouble and us an unanswerable question.