How to know which packages I have installed manually?

Question

Where on the web is Loki's install manifest file? I want to compare it with the current build to see what I have installed?

Or is there another way?

Answer 1

There's another easy way to know the installed packages in your system.

• Please open terminal and execute apt list --installed to see what packages you have installed in your elementary OS.
• Please note that executing this command will give you a long list depending on your installed packages. However, if you execute apt list --installed | less it will wait for you to press Enter. And after you press Enter, it will be showing / loading package name one-by-one.
• Let's say you want to find something from the installed packages. You can grep <package_name> to achieve this. For example, apt list --installed | grep 'language' will list every package installed in your system with "language" keyword in its name.

And to get the list of the apps/packages you manually installed please execute, comm -23 <(apt-mark showmanual | sort -u) <(gzip -dc /var/log/installer/initial-status.gz | sed -n 's/^Package: //p' | sort -u).