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There are some daemons I make zero use of and would like prevent from autostarting, those include avahi, zeitgeist, telepathy, apport and some others. Needless to say I'd like them not to start. Can this be achieved without uninstalling them (there still are dependencies and I even believe an occasion can heppen when I'll actually need them)?

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  • It isn't big enough or deep enough to be a full answer to your question, however if you are running ubuntu with the stock Unity DE then under settings>startup and shutdown there should be a place to enable or disable standard autostarting programs. Again, this barely scratches the surface of what actually runs but can take a big chunk out of what could be bogging down your PC
    – sbergeron
    Nov 25, 2015 at 4:58

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Yes, because you are using Ubuntu 15.10, you can now use systemd to disable these unwanted services.

You have two options: disable & mask.

OPTION ONE:

When you mask a service, you prevent any user or service from starting this service by creating a symlink to /dev/null.

To mask a service:

For example to completely disable apport, run the following command:

sudo systemctl stop apport
sudo systemctl mask apport
systemctl status apport

If successful, the last command should return the following:

● apport.service
   Loaded: masked (/dev/null)
   Active: inactive (dead)

OPTION TWO:

When you disable a service, you prevent the service from loading automatically at boot time.

However, the service may still start if called by another service when disabled and you can still start the service up by explicitly calling the service.

To disable a service:

To prevent apport from starting at boot, run the following command:

sudo systemctl stop apport
sudo systemctl disable apport
systemctl status apport

Run the following command for a more complete list and use grep to narrow the results:

systemctl status -a

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