linux mint is installed on a virtualbox with windows 7 as the host. It is mainly for working purpose, thus hope it can be small and quick. Now with continuing update, the image size boosts to 15G, which is way too big than I had expected. Is there a list which I can safely remove/uninstall to reduce the size yet not affecting the stability of the system?

The key words here are "than I had expected."

Perhaps you need to adjust your expectations.

AFAIC, Mint is Ubuntu done right, but it is also a fairly hefty distro. I know of no list of items you can delete to bring it down to your expectations, whatever they may be. That doesn't mean such a list doesn't exist, just that I don't know of it.

20 G (or so) for /
is what I choose.
The default partition schema suggests/includes "home" on same / (root partition)
How big is $HOME ?

"Hope" and "expectation"
Is work small and quick?

No list. Lower your "expectations". Sorry.

I hope the size can be maintained around 10G to bring my c drive back to have >10G free space. Some applications can be deleted without affecting the performance of the system, like thunderbird. Other things like video, image, game etc should be able to be removed from the system (without affecting watching youtube and display figures say). It would be great if somebody who is very familiar with the system can come up with such a list.

Linux mint requires 15gb hard disk space, with a recommended minimum of 20gb:

https://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=3597

In the year 2018, a 1TB hard drive costs less than $50. That means the recommended 20gb requires less than $1 of storage. I don't see the problem.

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Surely what you said is fully correct. We just have different perspectives. I have set up partition and isolated a space of roughly 20G for linux mint contained in virtualbox. With linux mint dynamically allocated, virtualbox might not take up to 20G and thus my c drive can have some free space. I don't want to go out of way to get a new drive for my laptop and install windows again and then virtualbox just to enlarge its size. As I said, the linux is mainly for working, so I really don't need other job unrelated stuff to be installed and frequently reminded to update.

If you have allocated 20gb then your virtual machine meets the recommended minimum, and there is no problem at all.

(Please note however, that the 20gb recommended minimum is in addition to your own personal data files. So if you need to manipulate 10gb of data files, then you should allocate 30gb: 20gb for the base Linux Mint system plus 10gb for your user data files.)

There is no list because everyone's needs are different.

You might be able to save *some* space by running apt clean, uninstalling unwanted packages, and perhaps using Bleachbit (carefully), but your chances of getting down to 10GB may be as thin as the setup you require and, even if you do so, you will be running out of space on a regular basis - many folk can attest as to how bothersome that can be.

To snowpine: The data disk is an external directory on windows system to expose the data to windows system to handle. So, indeed, I allocated 20G merely for linux mint itself

To hydrurga: I can choose packages to uninstall, but I am faced with two issues, (1) there are many packages I cannot recognize but might be very relevant running in the background. (2) These packages might use specific libraries which might be used by other software. But a complete uninstallation will erase those libraries as well, which will jeopardize the stability of the system.

Perfect! It sounds like you did everything correctly, just as I would have suggested.