BleachBit is a system cleaner for Linux - Is it a worth?

So I read on OMG!Ubuntu! about Bleach Bit, which is a system cleaner app written on GTK, and they just released version 4 porting to Python 3. And anyway, I thought to give it a shot. This video though isn’t that much about Bleach Bit itself, but it is more like a general question if we need such apps on Linux, and I’d like to have your feedback on comments please! You see, I have a friend she’s using Windows, and on Windows perhaps such apps make some more sense. For example, my friend is using CCleaner. Speaking of which, Bleach Bit also runs on Windows, although I didn’t try it. I dont have Windows, she has! I only have Linux, so lets finally start the app there! So we type Bleach on Shell, and now we have 2 options. We have the normal Bleach, and we have the Bleach AdSense.

01:05 - And I will start with that! Yeah! Right! Sure! In the meantime, can they stop trimming the app names at least on search? So we didn’t start this video exactly good, and I promise you we won’t continue good either! The first thing we notice is the badly created headerbar that buttons can’t maintain the correct height. And then, we have the app menu here as it should, and the old menu here as it shouldn’t. And all those happen on a new Bleach Bit release. Version 4.0 more specifically. And I’m honestly asking you. If you can’t even build a proper headerbar, or even if you didn’t care to build a proper headerbar, can you really build a system app? And it is not just the headerbar that is wrong. The BleachBit bug tracker is full of graphics issues, and it is not they’re doing something complicate.

02:02 - Anyway, lets go to the actual app, and I will show you some of the available cleaners. Bleach Bit will identify the apps we have installed and will try to perform some clean up on their data. And I will start with Chromium, that Bleach Bit does something like what Ctrl+Shift+Del does, but only worse. And in fact I’m not going to risk it and try any of the cleaners. Then I’ll go to X Logs, and basically I need to tick that first. And now there is an option to preview us what that cleaner will remove. So now we see the files to be deleted, together with their size. I will un-check this, and I’ll go to journal logs that is more interesting. Obviously here we can’t do a preview because we need to run journal first, that needs admin rights. But let me show you how this cleaner really works.

02:52 - This is Bleach Bit source code, and here we are interested for this function. As you can see, Bleach will spawn a “journalctl” process with “vacuum” parameters, and then it will capture the output. So Bleach doesn’t use systemd Python wrappers, but instead runs directly external commands. There are no words to describe how bad practice that is, and how insecure too. And it happens in many cleaners. Basically Bleach isn’t even an system app, but it is more like a collection of shell scripts executed from a graphical interface.

03:23 - And then there are some things like Flatpaks, for example Epiphany, that I’m quite sure that Bleach is confused so it won’t actually delete anything. Besides, all Flatpaks have their own storage that is easily managed from Settings interface, so Bleach has none business there. Then again, I’m realizing that someone may not know where all the garbage files go, specially someone new on Linux, like this guy here :) Damn! That was right on time! And anyway, so some cleaners like the system cleaner that will show us the paths of cache, are kinda useful. Assuming that the first 10000 paths won’t be Chromium profile! Bleach Bit has a few more capabilities but I’m not going to cover them. Quite frankly? I considered it a trash app.

04:11 - But a nice option I want to mention is that we can whitelist a file or folder, so Bleach won’t touch those. But I must to confess! I didn’t know I had 9GB of cache files. So perhaps Bleach isn’t so trash after all! But I’m still not gonna push that button! When something’s coming from GNOME, or is pre-installed in Fedora, or anyway it is something sponsored and commercial, I’m going to criticize it as much as it can get. However getting fun made projects from Github and trashing them? it is kinda lame. But I really want to pass a point here, and more specifically to the new Linux users.

04:47 - Don’t ever using GUI system tools! Never ever, and specially when those don’t come pre-installed on your distro, so they lack QA and testing. Believe me, it is only a matter of time till something terrible happens! Just trust the CLI. It is again a matter of time till something terrible happens, but at least it would be your fault! Back to the original question of the video. Do we need such tools in Linux? I’d say yes we do, as long as those are high quality, and certainly not Bleach Bit. Although still such apps are more useful for Windows that a friend of mine is using! .