Hi everyone. I keep getting a message of Low disk space on my Librem 5 even though i have only installed a couple of apps. I have also inserted a 512gb sd card but it can’t be used to transfer the apps there. It says that the operating system consumes 28.5 gb . I dont have any mp3s or movies on the internal memory. Its all in the sd card. I only have just a couple of apps installed
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sudo apt autoremove --purge
Usually it’s the kernel upgrades that are not cleaned up.
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Flatpaks occupy a lot of space in order to be distro-agnostic.
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A lot of energy too.
Gnome is so obsessioned with Flatpaks. Flatpak it is not for mobile, is unsecurity, is unprivacy, un-unix, unfreedom, unoptimized and break dependencies with stable OSes.
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You might also try
You can do 7d, 1d, etc. The journals can get somewhat large.
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Some additional measures are mentioned here: Low disk space - how to clean out garbage?
And here: Running out of memory already
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My guess would be either flatpaks or the system journal, or both. If you have not installed any flatpaks then … the system journal.
For managing the system journal: Tips & Tricks · Wiki · Librem5 / Librem 5 Community Wiki · GitLab
Note the first command given there to check how much disk space is being used by the system journal. Then you know whether to spend more time on managing the system journal or move on to some other explanation.
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Thanks a lot for the links. I managed to free 4.5 GB
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Flatpak is alright, but SNAP has some tiny issues that make gem more annoying in my experience.
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To list filesystem usage sorted by size:
sudo du -xak / | sort -n
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Not to be a total shill, but I am using the 128GB storage 4GB ram version of Librem 5 (“liberty phone”) and I never looked back. I have used about 65GB of main hard drive but it’s not increasingly rapidly. Whenever I turn on my old backup Librem 5 with the old original 32GB eMMC, it always complains about space. This seems like a case where its not a % of drive utilization, but rather a flat amount, so bigger eMMC does indeed eliminate the issue.
I also have a 1TB uSD for fun, though.
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I had some fights with flatpack Dlonk.
Its not like the others Linux packet managers. Its “userfriendly”. So you can install as root (i think for all users) and you can use it in Userspace as User.
There is a decalaration war with our youth, what would be the way modern computer systems have to work. And it has some good points that an unsecure Software package installed as users should have minimal Kernel breaking chances and some kind of sandbox to be safe is something try to steal your valuable private data or identity.
To make thinks short: It use twice of the space if you klick on Links to install flatpaks or download a file and install it as root. I was one of the old one that think it ask in a check box for higher rights. But in the new youth world it just install everything in your home directory as user. Pull all the dependencies again. Webkit, Browser, QT… its fun with less disk space.
But you are right. Future folks with future hardware will not have this issue. So its not be worth mentioning.
I am too have only 32 GB but also a 500GB uSD, but you know - you can not run flatpak on some file system like vfat. And after insert it to my phone i thought i just use it for Cat videos, Music, Pictures or temp disk space for my Linux system. - Because i know some uSD cards a unreliable because of the physical card/reader position in the phone slot.
I have two dreams. One is to braze the old storage from the phone and add a lager one - and the other is to have some kind of very small and clean OS with less dependencies and program source code that use as less computation to high perform all my wishes. Becuase i think that this way computers should work in 2025.
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If needed, you are free to partition the µSD card and make one partition contain a vfat (or exfat) file system and another partition contain an ext file system. While that is inherently wasteful of disk space maybe you can make it work for you needs.
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This low disk space on filesystem root has bit me from time to time over the last couple of years and I’d just delete some obvious trash files (painful on phosh) and vacuum the log files and regain 5 gig or so and be good for months. Now, I’m strapped (vacuumed down to 2d and still out of space), so I’m looking for an easy way to GUI browse the phone file system remotely and do a leisurely, thorough cleanup.
I settled on running an FTP server on the phone and connecting from “Files” from my Linux Mint desktop machine. I figured it would be fairly easy, as I share a ZFS pool from my desktop machine to my other local computers that way using “Usermode FTP Server”. Very convenient. So, I installed umftpd on the phone from FlatHub and fired it up. Using compositor scaling, it was easy to use.
But… failed logon. I can’t find an ftps command on Mint, so I used FileZilla in interactive mode to see what was going on.
Status: Connecting to 10.0.xxx.yyy:zzzz… Status: Connection established, waiting for welcome message… Status: Plain FTP is insecure. Please switch to FTP over TLS. Command: USER purism Response: 331 Username ok, send password. Command: PASS ******** Response: 530 Authentication failed. Error: Critical error: Could not connect to server
Yeah, I know – not secure. It does the same thing with FTPS, I just switched to see if the encryption was the problem. No, it’s clearly the password. “umftpd” uses the credentials for the user who is running the daemon, so “purism” and my PIN are the appropriate credentials. I get an SSH login to the L5 from the desktop machine just fine.
As I said, umftpd works fine when running on my desktop machine. Ideas, anyone?
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Híjole… mea culpa! 
“umftpd” generated a password – works fine if I enter the right password.
I’m leaving the above post in case others find it helpful to browse/copy/delete their L5 files remotely.
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You might consider Jumpdrive.
But if you want to do it “live” then sshfs is an option.
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Oh! I knew about that… and then forgot all about it. 
I had tried umftpd and was mildly annoyed that I had read-only access. Thought I would have to monkey with permissions or something but didn’t have to. The next time I opened the connection from Nautilus, I looked at the types of connections available and tried ssh. Perfect! Wiped about 6GB of dross and the L5 is no longer gasping.
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