BleachBit: GPL System Cleaner | Hacker News Reader

BleachBit: GPL System Cleaner

bleachbit.org

34 pointsvmorgulis9 comments

I do wish these cleaner-type programs paid more attention to what they're deleting, and whether it's worth trading off 100K of disk space to lose out on fresh log data that may be helpful. I also wish they'd understand that not all .log files are text logs...it'd be nice if they concentrated on quality, not quantity.

But those 100K may also contain privacy related information and you want them gone. BB (and other cleaners) aren't only to free some space. Probably that is their least concern. In any case it is just a convenient tool and should be used with care.

They may also have been the save for the game you had almost finished (oh hey, cookies). The most important thing is to think twice before taking any irrevocable action, and be sure that it's really what you wanted to do.

The most extreme example I had come across is JRT(0) which will, by default and with no prompt, remove every program from Chinese developers including major public companies such as Tencent, Baidu and AliBaba. Thankfully it only deleted the binaries and config files but not actual user data so I did not lose the logs saved in Tencent Messenger.

TBH I was not even mad but more impressed with the graceful and virtually silent process. Plus it actually managed to get rid of the search malware that came with the latest version of uTorrent (silly me) that refuses to go away and I was happy.

(0)https://www.malwarebytes.org/junkwareremovaltool/

P.S. My episode was before Malwarebytes bought JRT in house so it may have changed since.So yeah, will recommend to friends as long as they don't run software from China.

I was confused by the title, I thought it was something like "remove all GPL software from your machine". (GPL Software) Cleaner as opposed to GPL (Software Cleaner).

> Opera

Which Opera?

This question is important, because it is hard to trust a potentially destructive tool when the creators either conflate, or are unaware of there even being, 2 wildly different software suites under the same name.

It is customizable with XML config files:

http://docs.bleachbit.org/doc/cleanerml.html

For Opera:

https://github.com/az0/bleachbit/blob/master/cleaners/opera....

Ah, neat, the old one then. You should be aware that Opera as of 15 and above is a reskinned chrome, so you can probably just copy the chrome one for that and rename it to Opera 15+.

I opened an issue: https://github.com/az0/bleachbit/issues/127

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