I am obsessed with decluttering.
Not just with having fewer things, but with reducing the little traces things leave behind. Old cache folders. Duplicate versions. Stray config files. Applications that work, technically, but have no proper place in the system. I like things to be clear and minimal. Sometimes that instinct helps me. Sometimes it hurts. For now, it is what it is.
It started with Linux portable apps. A .tar.gz file is easy to download, but afterward I am left deciding where it belongs, how to launch it, how to update it, and how to remove it without leaving pieces behind.
So I wrote a small tool for it. Over time, that clutter spread to other parts of my machine, so the tool grew with it. I renamed it Clinux.
It now handles four things I used to tidy by hand:
- Portable apps: Extracts
.tar.gzand.ziparchives into~/.local/opt/, adds desktop menu entries and$PATHlinks, and uninstalls cleanly. - System caches: Scans and purges package manager caches (Pacman, Flatpak, APT), Conda archives, and developer caches (pip, npm, cargo, R) without blind root commands.
- AI skills and models: As coding agents multiplied, skills scattered across Claude Code, Antigravity, and Codex. It toggles agent skills with symlinks, and prunes old model weights and session databases when disk space gets tight.
- Dotfiles: Connects to my GNU Stow setup to preview, apply, and selectively link configurations per package.
It runs locally on Python standard library only. No pip dependencies, no virtual environments, no background daemons. A lightweight browser UI when I want to inspect everything, and quick CLI commands when I want to move fast.
It does not fix my relationship with clutter. It just gives me one quiet place to deal with it.