Double the software after an upgrade?

[vasa1]

I installed 11.04 a couple of months before 11.10 came out. I didn't make significant changes to 11.04 and then chose to upgrade to 11.10 rather than do a fresh install.

While the upgrade was successful, there's a point that noticed just yesterday: I now have both Evolution and Thunderbird and I still have a happily functioning Synaptic Package Manager.

I'm not interested in removing Synaptic, but I don't use either T'bird or Evolution (or anything in that category). Is it okay to remove Evolution and even T'bird? I'm pretty sure I won't need them.

I'm asking because removing something like Firefox doesn't seem advisable since links in some Ubuntu components (Ubuntu Software Center) appear to be "hardwired" to Firefox.

[garvinrick4]

There are some packages that are now in default download that were not in 11.04 so on
upgrade you still have the packages in 11.04 and ones in 11.10. One that seems to be
most significant is gdm to lightdm. And yes Thunderbird instead of Evolution. I do not
see any reason why you cannot get rid of any packages you want that do not affect others.
They do not seem to bother anything but if you need the room or just have an obsession with
cleaning anything from your system you do not use, have at it.
The nice thing about having a separate /home is you just make a clean install whenever
you feel like it and not worry about dist-upgrades, so many packages to upgrade over 1000 takes
longer than Burning a disk and installing fresh, going to want the Live Cd anyway so downloading and
burning is a moot point. Seems to take no time for a set up when you know your packages. So I say fresh install is just cleaner.