I just switched from Bazzite to Cachy today. For some reason my disk space got… clogged, with Bazzite? Filelight was no help so I backed everything up, wiped the disk, installed Cachy, replaced my files, and the disk went from being nearly full to only using 600GB. Still not sure what happened there.
Cachy, meanwhile, has asked me to update 4 times in the 4 hours I’ve been using it. Which is fine, I get that Arch is rolling release, but now on the 4th update it keep failing for some reason. Also I can’t have my headphones and speakers plugged in at the same time or my speakers don’t work.
Sigh. All this KDE stuff is nice and flashy, and my games have worked with both Bazzite and Cachy, so I appreciate that, but damn is it tough for me to make a Linux recommendation to anyone else that isn’t just “use Mint, it’s stable.” Anything more in depth turns into a mini essay (see above!)
It’s inefficient, but he is stating that he is now using “only 600GB”, so I would guess it shouldn’t be that notable to someone who thinks 600GB is not much.
I used to dislike it, but consider that Flatpak is allowing a lot of small distros to exist outside of Debian/RHEL/Arch. Void, Chimera, Adélie or Guix (insert yours here) “only” have to implement a desktop environment and Flatpak to be usable. It’s not ideal and it kind of goes against the point of those distros, but they definitely couldn’t package Flathub’s 3300 apps themselves. Especially the proprietary ones that only provide a .deb and .rpm.
Also the sandboxing is nice when installing proprietary stuff. I don’t want Microsoft Team drooling all over my stuff.
Oh, I didn’t realize how unclear that was. The disk is a 2TB NVME SSD. I searched and searched, even booted into Mint on another disk and tried to search from there, and could only find a few hundred GB worth of files (probably about 600GB if I had to guess, lol). I genuinely have no idea what could have been taking up nearly 1.4TB of space, so that’s all I meant when I said “only.”
My suspicion is that something was going wrong whenever I deleted anything. Maybe for some reason the data just weren’t going anywhere, even though the trash was empty and they were no longer showing up in their old locations. Hence the term “clogged.” No similar issues with Cachy just yet, though.
So, yeah, flatpak is horribly inneficient on disk usage and can easily take 60GB if you are a bit generous on app installs. 60GB is, notably, less than 1.4TB
Out of curiosity, how did you search for what was using up the space? Did you try apps like baobab or filelight? One of them is usually preinstalled and they have not failed me yet (except when hard-linking or copy-on-write is involved, but that shouldn’t show up on the global disk usage percentage)
Just checked the fstab on my tablet and they have subvolumes for root, home, srv, cache, log and tmp. I also have snap-pac installed and not sure if it’s installed by default but I assume it is. Their KDE is awesome! Very polished. They have really taken the time to make arch easy.
They have all sorts of aliases in the .bashrc that are there to make transitioning to arch a little less daunting to the average user. Things like reflector to stay current with mirrorlists.
The have warnings when something is wrong during updates with instructions how to fix, taking care of conflicts during updates, fixing pacman lock, garuda-update remote fix to restore pacman to their default’s. Chaotic AUR might be installed by default, not sure it’s been a long while since I installed. Great setup assistant, and installer. btrfs-assistant and eza setup. Might want to install and set up meld to handle pacdiff in the .bashrc alias pacdiff="sudo -H DIFFPROG=meld pacdiff"
If you want easyarch Garuda is it. If you want a real arch experience without having to go through the manual install process, endeavour or archinstall is the way to go. You might have to setup btrfs and snapper the way you want it manually though. Im not sure about endeavour as I haven’t used it in a while. It’s pretty easy to do though.
I just switched from Bazzite to Cachy today. For some reason my disk space got… clogged, with Bazzite? Filelight was no help so I backed everything up, wiped the disk, installed Cachy, replaced my files, and the disk went from being nearly full to only using 600GB. Still not sure what happened there.
Cachy, meanwhile, has asked me to update 4 times in the 4 hours I’ve been using it. Which is fine, I get that Arch is rolling release, but now on the 4th update it keep failing for some reason. Also I can’t have my headphones and speakers plugged in at the same time or my speakers don’t work.
Sigh. All this KDE stuff is nice and flashy, and my games have worked with both Bazzite and Cachy, so I appreciate that, but damn is it tough for me to make a Linux recommendation to anyone else that isn’t just “use Mint, it’s stable.” Anything more in depth turns into a mini essay (see above!)
The tool
gduis very nice for finding space culprits.Never used Bazzite, but isn’t it heavy on packaged apps with snap or flatpak? Inherently space inefficient (and I despise them both passionately).
Don’t update all the time. I update every couple of days like a maniac, but once every few weeks is fine too.
There’s a distro for every level of “I want to do it myself” vs “I want everything to be made ready for me”.
It’s flatpak. Not snap, by god, not snap.
It’s inefficient, but he is stating that he is now using “only 600GB”, so I would guess it shouldn’t be that notable to someone who thinks 600GB is not much.
I used to dislike it, but consider that Flatpak is allowing a lot of small distros to exist outside of Debian/RHEL/Arch. Void, Chimera, Adélie or Guix (insert yours here) “only” have to implement a desktop environment and Flatpak to be usable. It’s not ideal and it kind of goes against the point of those distros, but they definitely couldn’t package Flathub’s 3300 apps themselves. Especially the proprietary ones that only provide a .deb and .rpm.
Also the sandboxing is nice when installing proprietary stuff. I don’t want Microsoft Team drooling all over my stuff.
Oh, I didn’t realize how unclear that was. The disk is a 2TB NVME SSD. I searched and searched, even booted into Mint on another disk and tried to search from there, and could only find a few hundred GB worth of files (probably about 600GB if I had to guess, lol). I genuinely have no idea what could have been taking up nearly 1.4TB of space, so that’s all I meant when I said “only.”
My suspicion is that something was going wrong whenever I deleted anything. Maybe for some reason the data just weren’t going anywhere, even though the trash was empty and they were no longer showing up in their old locations. Hence the term “clogged.” No similar issues with Cachy just yet, though.
So, yeah, flatpak is horribly inneficient on disk usage and can easily take 60GB if you are a bit generous on app installs. 60GB is, notably, less than 1.4TB
Out of curiosity, how did you search for what was using up the space? Did you try apps like baobab or filelight? One of them is usually preinstalled and they have not failed me yet (except when hard-linking or copy-on-write is involved, but that shouldn’t show up on the global disk usage percentage)
You probably had snapper making tons of backups. You can open up btrfs assistant and delete some old snapper backups to make room.
Set up the snapper-timeline.timer and set snapshots to only snap on update/remove of packages with snap-pac. Also from the arch wiki,
Create subvolumes for things that are not worth being snapshotted, like /var/cache/pacman/pkg, /var/abs, /var/tmp, and /srv.Is there a distro that sets this up well by default?
Garuda Linux -> https://garudalinux.org/
Just checked the fstab on my tablet and they have subvolumes for root, home, srv, cache, log and tmp. I also have snap-pac installed and not sure if it’s installed by default but I assume it is. Their KDE is awesome! Very polished. They have really taken the time to make arch easy.
They have all sorts of aliases in the .bashrc that are there to make transitioning to arch a little less daunting to the average user. Things like reflector to stay current with mirrorlists.
The have warnings when something is wrong during updates with instructions how to fix, taking care of conflicts during updates, fixing pacman lock,
garuda-update remote fixto restore pacman to their default’s. Chaotic AUR might be installed by default, not sure it’s been a long while since I installed. Great setup assistant, and installer. btrfs-assistant and eza setup. Might want to install and set up meld to handle pacdiff in the .bashrcalias pacdiff="sudo -H DIFFPROG=meld pacdiff"If you want easyarch Garuda is it. If you want a real arch experience without having to go through the manual install process, endeavour or archinstall is the way to go. You might have to setup btrfs and snapper the way you want it manually though. Im not sure about endeavour as I haven’t used it in a while. It’s pretty easy to do though.