Raspbian, the official Raspberry Pi operating system, comes with a surprising amount of unwanted bloatware.
Introducing Lean-pi, my raspbian de-bloating tool. It makes stripping your pi images of bloatware easy!
(Alternatively, download the image without the "recommended software" and flash it without NOOBS, this will start you off with far less bloat to remove.)
Lean-pi contains a list of packages which serve little purpose. It uses the package manager to remove them, their configuration, and their dependencies. Some of these packages include Scratch, Wolfram / Mathematica, Minecraft PI, Sonic Pi, and many others. On its most agressive setting, Lean-pi removes approximately 2.5 GB of unwanted data!
- Make a backup of your raspberry pi disk image.
- Download the Lean-pi latest release. and unzip it
- Make the script runnable:
chmod +x leanpi.sh - Run the script and follow its directions:
./leanpi.sh - Restart your pi.
Lean-pi does not remove everything. If you want a Raspbian version with nothing on it, download the Raspbian LITE image. Lean-pi keeps the LXDE desktop, the Geany code editor, and some small utilities that come with the OS. Whatever you do, do not remove python! That will break everything!
Lean-pi removes the Pixel LXDE skin that comes with Raspbian. It gets uninstalled as an incorrectly marked dependency.
To restore the Pixel skin, simply run
sudo apt-get install raspberry-ui-mods
and then restart your pi.
I cannot test every configuration. This script can cause unintended side effects if used improperly. I only recommend running this script on fresh installs.
If you find any issues, report them using the Issuse section of this repository.