BleachBit is a software application that allows you to easily and quickly clean your operating system of accumulated “junk”. The main advantage of BleachBit is that the cleaner is a cross-platform application that can be easily run on both Linux and Windows.
This kind of software is primarily needed for those who like to install and uninstall a lot of different software.
Every user accumulates a lot of “junk” during his work, in the form of leftovers of configuration files of longtime applications, log files and other unnecessary information.
Strengths of BleachBit:
- The program is well russified and each item of the cleaner menu is clearly explained, which undoubtedly means that the application was developed with newcomers in mind.
- The cleaner allows you to remove unused interface languages.
- BleachBit can clean RAM and virtual (swap) memory.
- The program is able to delete temporary files, lists of downloaded files and passwords of different browsers (Opera, Safari, Chromium, Chrome, SeaMonkey, Firefox and Internet Explorer). In addition, the program optimizes used databases.
- BleachBit supports temporary file cleanup and database optimization for programs like aMSN, aMule, Audacios, Beagle, Easytag, Evolution, emesene, Filezilla, gFTP, Gimp, Google Earth, Gwenview, Liferia, Lives, Miro, MySQL, Pidgin and many other programs.
- The program also cleans the history and cache of Gnome, Nautilus, Adobe Flash.
- BleachBit allows you to clean up all the Thumbs.db files that appear as a result of Windows.
Installing
- In order to download the latest version of BleachBit on Linux, you need to download the distribution from the official site of the project. If you use Ubuntu, Debian, Linux Mint, Fedora, Red Hat, Mandriva, openSUSE or CentOS, then don’t forget to install the optional Bonus pack.
- You can also download BleachBit on Windows from the official project page.
- The official Ubuntu repository uses an outdated version of BleachBit, so it is not recommended to install from it, but if it does not matter to you, you can install with the command
- sudo apt-get install bleachbit
- Once installed, you can run BleachBit through the Applications→System Utilities→BleachBit shortcut.
There will most likely be 2 shortcuts to run the application in this section of the menu: BleachBit and sudo BleachBit.
If you only need to clean up your operating system with BleachBit in your home directory (/home/login), then you don’t need root access, so running BleachBit through the BleachBit shortcut will be sufficient.
If you plan to clear APT cache, remove unnecessary interface localizations and other actions that require superuser rights, then it is more correct to run the sudo BleachBit shortcut.