I'm a Linux user, but you can't always easily remove the random crap that gets installed. An Ubuntu server install will come with "modem manager" (wtf does that even do?!) and a bunch of other crap which isn't exactly useful in a VM environment. Yet if you try to remove them, you'll find that it tries to remove the whole system since it depends on "ubuntu-server" or some such. Sure, you could remove that meta package and reinstall the things you actually need manually, but that's still a terrible pita.

At least all this junk doesn't start up random daemons, like windows does.