Some are applicable to any APT-based distro.

To remove translations,

$ cd /etc ; echo "Acquire::Languages { \"none\"; };" > apt/apt.conf.d/99translation ; cd - >/dev/null

To automatically update system essentials,

$ apt install unattended-upgrades ; dpkg-reconfigure --priority=low unattended-upgrades

• Using apt tool:

  apt list --installed 2>/dev/null | grep installed

  • Note that apt will issue a warning when piping its output in shell. Hence, the need to redirect stderr to /dev/null.
  • We can further grep away the packages that were automatically installed.

Using the basic dpkg tool:

dpkg --get-selections | sed -n 's/^\([^\t]*\)\t.*$/\1/ p'

This version, however, only provides package name. To extract similar output from apt (assuming output was redirected into a file called temp.txt), run

cat temp.txt | sed -n 's|^\(.*\)/.*$|\1| p'