[Sir_Substance]

>Doesn't `apt-get autoremove` remove those old kernels?

Of course it doesn't! Why would you assume such a silly thing? /s https://askubuntu.com/questions/563483/why-doesnt-apt-get-au...

[pmontra]

I confirm that it doesn't autoremove. I had to empty /boot on some servers lately.

Anyway sometimes one wants to keep old kernels. I have an old laptop that runs OK with a 3.something kernel and has wierd video sync problems with any newer ones. Ubuntu 16.04 keeps running with that old kernel so I keep booting from that, maybe once or twice per year.

However the proper solution would be pinning a package and autoremoving the others.

[alphapapa]

Yes, it does remove old kernels. Read the very link you posted.

[flamedoge]

> It's better to err on the side of saving too many kernels than saving too few

But Muh Freedoms! I hate to be subject to one man's opinion of things /s

[Sir_Substance]

It's also kind of a garbage argument.

People who know they have broken kernels don't keep upgrading them, they stop and fix them.

People who don't know they have broken kernels also don't know they can boot with an older kernel, so they get nothing from the "backup".

We want to leave some time for people to realize their kernel is broken, so keeping three is probably just fine. Honestly, it would probably be adequate to just bump the oldest one off the queue whenever a newer one is requested. If you've got a tiny boot partition, maybe that means only two revisions. If you've got a huge boot partition it could be 20.

But just keeping them all and making people manually uninstall them gains you nothing, it's user-hostile for no reason.