Microsoft is definitely one of the pioneers with flat design, with their Windows Phone system and with what is now Windows 8. Some people seem to be confused by the move, but to me it’s always made perfect sense: with so many different screen sizes and resolutions, flat design is really about embracing content, good margins, and most importantly, vector graphics.

I’ve been making websites for years, and I really never liked the Photoshop trend. Making everything in a fixed resolution, cutting all the pieces up, and assembling again was just way too much work for what was mostly a fad. Knowing enough basics about space and the fundamentals of CSS, it’s easy enough to make simple, powerful designs without any raster assets. In short, going the path of pure CSS is about going vector, which looks sharp everywhere and is more efficient in terms of data usage and both server and client resources.

With Google+, it seems clear enough that the next pattern is to enable the content to come through. Microsoft with their Windows interface is invested in color combinations with simple iconography, and the Google way is to keep things mostly white. Facebook does still have its blue banner up top, but largely it’s a white slate as well. White doesn’t clash when you have photos, and re: what I might call the Pinterest effect, it’s images (again, not chrome) that drive the most clicks and views.

Still, I managed to go on a tear, installing all sorts of applications, and when the smoke cleared I was pretty sure I didn’t need everything that I had. It was time for a bit of cleaning up. Problem is, the APT tools don’t give you a lot of insight into how to proceed.

Disclaimer

I should add that there’s a good reason for this obscurity: if you have a package, and you drop the source, again, you run a good risk of having that software installed and never able to be updated.

Generate list

With your safety hat on, you can now proceed to running the following command:

for i in `dpkg --get-selections | cut -f1`; do \
  grep -lr "^Filename: .*/${i}" \
    /var/lib/apt/lists/ 2>/dev/null >> /tmp/list; \
done

The first line gets a list of the software which you have either installed or half installed (“deinstall”). For each of these packages, then, we perform a grep to look for that package in all the files in /var/lib/apt/lists/.

Process list

This list which you created is a bit of a mess. Each line is the filename from which you found the package, which corresponds to one of your software sources. Luckily, two stock utilities can clean this up:

sed 's/-[a-z0-9]\+_Packages$//' list | sort | uniq

You can omit the sed command if you’d like, but it will filter out duplicates for each architecture — well, in my case anyway, for amd64 and i386. The list still needs room for a bit of interpretation, but it should be easy enough to tie each line to a record in the /etc/apt/sources.list file, or in one of potentially many files in /etc/apt/sources.list.d/.