Ubuntu 20.04LTS, headless machine, with no Wifi card.
wpa_supplicant is running and wasting my resources (although not too much I think).
I know I can disable it with systemctl stop|disable|mask.
However, (how) can/shall I completely remove it from Ubuntu 20.04?
Is it safe to remove it? I don't have GUI. It's a headless machine which can only be accessed remotely.
sudo apt remove wpasupplicant
Will remove it, make sure it use apt purge wpasupplicant after. You can always type sudo apt remove wpa then press TAB to autocomplete any possibilities (might have to TAB twice).
I mention the TAB completion because on my system I also have wpa-sycophant, which you might also have and not need.
As far as whether or not you should, it is only for Wi-Fi, technically it is for the Authentication method within WiFi IEEE 802.11 so I guess if your not using it, you don't need it. If you want to check exactly what it does you can run man wpa_supplicant and read it's description. You should be able to manage your connections with nmcli. Hope that helps!
OTOH, if you want to learn something about the resource usage of wpa_supplicant. In my case (and I use wpa_supplicant):
$ pgrep wpa_supplicant
407
486
$ sudo pmap 407 | tail -n 1
total 11792K
$ sudo pmap 486 | tail -n 1
total 12056K
So - quite a lot of memory usage - but again, wpa_supplicant is quite active on my host.
