It's perfectly fine to remove such packages, but it will remove the metapackage. Removing the metapackage by removing a dependency of it will however not remove the packages it depends on, or mark them for automatic removal.
For example, compare removing ubuntu-standard with removing lshw in xenial: The first case marks the packages as autoremovable, the second does not. root@xenial:~# apt remove ubuntu-standard Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done The following packages were automatically installed and are no longer required: accountsservice apt-transport-https bind9-host command-not-found command-not-found-data dmidecode dnsutils friendly-recovery ftp geoip-database hdparm info iputils-tracepath irqbalance language-selector-common libaccountsservice0 libbind9-140 libdns162 libgeoip1 libisc160 libisccc140 libisccfg140 liblwres141 libnuma1 libpcap0.8 libusb-1.0-0 lshw lsof ltrace mtr-tiny nano ntfs-3g popularity-contest powermgmt-base python3-commandnotfound python3-gdbm tcpdump telnet time usbutils Use 'apt autoremove' to remove them. The following packages will be REMOVED: ubuntu-standard 0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 1 to remove and 70 not upgraded. After this operation, 46.1 kB disk space will be freed. Do you want to continue? [Y/n] ^C root@xenial:~# apt remove lshw Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done The following packages will be REMOVED: lshw ubuntu-standard 0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 2 to remove and 69 not upgraded. After this operation, 706 kB disk space will be freed. Do you want to continue? [Y/n] ^C This bug has been reported against trusty, where behavior is different: Packages are not marked as automatically installed when installed due to a dependency from a metapackage. It's highly likely the systems affected where misconfigured, as the packages could not have been shown for autoremoval if they were manually installed in the first place. -- You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu Bugs, which is subscribed to Ubuntu. https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1549310 Title: Removing or causing lubuntu-desktop to be removed marks packages for autoremove To manage notifications about this bug go to: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/apt/+bug/1549310/+subscriptions -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list ubuntu-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs
