[t0astbread]

This is not exactly a fair comparison because it is documented and configurable but I've recently found out apt on its default settings does something unexpected (for me at least) when removing packages (purge + autoremove): Normally you (I) would expect all automatically installed dependencies (depends/recommends/suggests) to be gone after this, if no other package references them in its depends/recommends lists (which is what gets installed on the default settings).

However it turns out if a package suggests another package and that other package somehow gets installed, the suggested package will not be autoremoved anymore because autoremove honors suggests relationships as a reason for not removing automatically installed packages. While there are valid reasons for this (e.g. when installing something with --install-suggests) it also amounts to a lot of unwanted packages after a while of installing/uninstalling software. I don't know if this has an widespread name but I call it "suggestion congestion" for that.

Of course, one can turn this off by setting APT::AutoRemove::SuggestsImportant to "false". And really, that is an awful problem to solve since you have to deal with different users and package maintainers with different expectations. And apt still solves a lot more problems that it creates.

But I'm now convinced that there is no such thing as a clean uninstall. At least not until the year of the stateless ZFS snapshot rollback NixOS desktop.

[danudey]

You can also pass --no-install-recommends to apt for a one-off installation to avoid pulling in a ton of garbage from a specific installation.