Bleachbit goes far further than MX-Cleanup does when removing cruft from a users homedir when its run as a user. BB starts out with an empty selection list, the user has to select the items they want cleaned. If one item requires root, then BB will show a bunch of red errors in the process window clearly stating no permissions.
To clean the item/s in the root only zone, you have to start BB as root, and that's where you need to use a bit of wisdom. Dangerous, possibly in a fools hands, but certainly not even close to dangerous in a careful users hands. It's kind of like driving a 1000+hp sleeper, nobody has to know it will knock the socks of anything that tries to take it on because most of the time, it will be operated in a sane manner. The power is there to get yourself a royal wreck and some jail time, but in the right hands, it is just fine.
Once configured, bleachbit is a dream to use, in fact, for me, it's a set and forget affair. My first run toook me the best part of 15 mins to work out as I "tested" its capabilities, but once set, it's a no brainer. Close all running apps to avoid getting file open errors, click the "clean" button and you're done, it's really that simple.
The way I use BB most times is with luckybackup, the terminal version of BB runs before my user data backup starts. I achieve this by adding
bleachbit -c --preset into LB's Also Execute tab as per the following picture.
In my ~/.config/bleachbit/bleachbit.ini, the following are the "safe" cleaners I have preset for the systems I run. The list includes some kde elements because I use the likes of kdenlive and okular. These presets do not remove any passwords, history or cookies, I do that manually if I need to from within the browsers and if one of my machines does not contain an element that is in the list then it just passes over it and records an error in the log, which is insignificant for that machine because the item simply does not exist.
If you want to see how that looks like, create a new user account, log into it an open BB. Select a few items then close it and a new bleachbit.ini will be created for you in the new users /.config/bleachbit/ folder. Now rename that bleachbit.ini file to include .bak at the end, make a copy of it with the original name, and paste the contents of the tree section below, excluding of course the bracketed tree, and save the changes. Now open BB and see what is selected for cleaning.
Use this as you wish, it's unlikely to harm any critical or important user data and just so you know, I set up BB for windows users using the same types of selections and I have done so for many years without a single complaint. The customers come back, so that's gotta say it's a data and content safe recipe.
---- EDIT ----
Disclaimer !
The version below includes a line to retain the english locale. I do not say to copy this unless you're like me, where English is your only language. This field tells BB to retain the locale data for en only WHEN the option under system called localizations is selected. I used to use this a lot, but that is before the MX Locale app was developed. This line is however still very useful for other distros.
Code: Select all
[preserve_languages]
en = True
[tree]
deepscan.backup = True
deepscan = True
deepscan.tmp = True
firefox.cache = True
firefox = True
firefox.crash_reports = True
google_chrome.cache = True
google_chrome = True
google_chrome.session = True
kde = True
kde.tmp = True
konqueror = True
konqueror.cookies = True
konqueror.current_session = True
konqueror.url_history = True
libreoffice.cache = True
x11 = True
x11.debug_logs = True
thunderbird.cache = True
thunderbird = True
system = True
system.trash = True
system.clipboard = True
flash = True
flash.cache = True
flash.cookies = True
google_chrome.dom = True
firefox.vacuum = True
google_chrome.vacuum = True
kde.cache = True
thunderbird.vacuum = True
vlc.memory_dump = True
vlc = True
firefox.backup = True
firefox.dom = True
firefox.session_restore = True
google_chrome.search_engines = True
system.tmp = True
