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apt-mark aims to do this: the commands apt-mark showmanual and apt-mark showauto should show you respectively the packages which you explicitly installed and the ones which were added as dependenci...
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#1: Initial revision
`apt-mark` aims to do this: the commands `apt-mark showmanual` and `apt-mark showauto` should show you respectively the packages which you explicitly installed and the ones which were added as dependencies. There are caveats. 1. There seems to be a common complaint that it shows too many packages as manual; it's possible that running `apt-mark minimize-manual` would address that complaint. 2. It's quite likely that some of the initially installed packages will be marked as manual, because `apt autoremove` will remove any package marked as auto which isn't a dependency of a package marked as manual. Running `apt-mark showmanual` at install and saving for future comparison would largely address this issue.