What Packages are Installed?

• May 12, 2026
• hay,
• farm,
• chatGpt

I am on Debian flavor. I would like to see a list of packages I have manually installed.

On Debian (and Ubuntu-based systems), the cleanest way is usually:

apt-mark showmanual

That shows packages marked as manually installed rather than pulled in automatically as dependencies.

More useful versions

Only packages currently installed

apt-mark showmanual | sort

Exclude common base/system packages

Sometimes the list still contains a lot of things from the initial install. This filters out packages that came from the installer task selections:

comm -23 \
  <(apt-mark showmanual | sort) \
  <(gzip -dc /var/log/installer/initial-status.gz \
      | sed -n 's/^Package: //p' | sort)

That gives a closer approximation of:

“What did I explicitly install later?”

See installation dates too

grep " install " /var/log/dpkg.log* \
  | grep -v automatic

Or for a readable history:

grep "Commandline:" /var/log/apt/history.log*

This shows the actual apt install ... commands that were run.

If you use tasksel or desktop environments

Be aware:

• installing something like GNOME/KDE can mark many packages manual
• metapackages can also make the list noisy

So the “exclude installer packages” method above is often the most useful.

Export your manual package list for backup/reinstall

apt-mark showmanual > packages-manual.txt

Then later:

xargs -a packages-manual.txt sudo apt install

That’s a common migration strategy between Debian systems.

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