Tips for Managing Disk Space?

Hardware Librem 5
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I’m working to make my Librem 5 my daily driver, which unfortunately for me meant installing Waydroid and various Flatpak apps, which of course are eating up tons of space on my phone.

I have followed the directions on another post to limit journal entries.

And I have an 256mb micro SD card installed. Other people have said that trying to run apps off that card is really slow, so I have been avoiding that.

But I will make sure to store my pictures and documents on the external card.

Short of going out and buying a Liberty phone, are there any other tips people have to keep me from maxing out my space?

Many thanks!

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Ensure that scheduled backups are saving to the external card.

See if any flatpaks can be replaced with the native PureOS version.

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There is a thread on preventing flatpaks from overtaking all available space. In particular:

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Are there any flatpaks installed by default that have native PureOS versions?

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@amarok and @j_s I’ve been checking for native PureOS versions, yes. And even looking for websites that I can create a Web Application with. But no luck so far for things like Signal, Joplin, Nextcloud.

I’d like Nextcloud desktop so I can have local versions of files on my phone (which will be stored in my SD card) since I travel to places where I lose connectivity frequently, and I don’t seem to know a way to sync files locally using Online Accounts (maybe there is a way?).

I’m at 72% of disk capacity right now, but am not quite done setting up everything I need on the L5. I wanted to post now before it became a huge urgency.

@riabenko Thanks for those tips - I’ll plan to do that as well.

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I was asking for examples of flatpaks installed by default that have native PureOS versions, not echoing that as a potential solution. If so, I might want to do some preemptive substituting.

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@j_s My apologies, I misunderstood you. I don’t know of any personally, but someone else might.

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If you have flatpaks then the following is probably only a small contribution but see also: Tips & Tricks · Wiki · Librem5 / Librem 5 Community Wiki · GitLab

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No need to apologise, English is inherently ambiguous, as endlessly discussed in the thread on the meaning of free. I just wanted to clarify my question, and I apologise for the slight hijacking of your thread.

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I clean out disk space with the following commands:

sudo journalctl --vacuum-time=1d

sudo journalctl --vacuum-size=100M

sudo journalctl --rotate

flatpak remove --unused --delete-data

rm -r ~/.local/share/flatpak/appstream/*

sudo rm -r /var/lib/flatpak/appstream/*

flatpak uninstall --unused

I also use Bleachbit occasionally.

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Thanks @flanders51.

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I also realized in PureOS store when I scroll way down on installed applications, there were some programs with multiple versions installed (like Mesa). So I uninstalled old versions of those apps (one wouldn’t because it said it was needed by another app), and am crossing my fingers I didn’t break anything.

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There is a post about cleaning out Flatpak bloat somewhere in here. I deleted Mesa and other things for awhile but gave up and accepted that Flatpaks are just going to be like that. I did remove Waydroid because I never use it. That helped a lot with free space.

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I do these as well.

rm -rf /var/tmp/flatpak-cache-*
rm -rf /var/lib/flatpak/.removed/

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The only flatpaks I currently have are associated with the PureOS store, and I don’t remember what might have been default the last time I reflashed.

In any case, I mainly had user-installed flatpaks in mind when I made the suggestion.

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$ flatpak update
$ flatpak remove --unused --delete-data
$ rm -r ~/.local/share/flatpak/appstream/*
$ sudo rm -r /var/lib/flatpak/appstream/*
$ sudo flatpak repair
$ flatpak --user repair

@flanders51 I don’t know anything about programming. Could your suggested commands and this other command list (above) result in other things on the L5 not working as well? If so, I won’t be able to do anything about it.

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Well, maybe it could cause problems? It has not for me. If it did, you could always uninstall and reinstall flathub.

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