What is using up my hard drive space?

[Autodave]

Fairly fresh install of 20.04 on an HP Stream. Disk usage analyzer says "30.1 GB total, 16.8 GB free." But, there really isn't anything installed except solitaire and Xiphos. Normally, and install like this would use up less than 3 GB of space. I noticed a 1.3 GB swap. However in /usr/lib I am showing 4 GB in use there. I really coul;d use the extra HD space that I should have.......how do I find out where it is all being used up and why? Was this a corrupted install possibly?

[ajgreeny]

Show us the output of

df -hT

which is much easier to understand than your description.

[grahammechanical]

But, there really isn't anything installed except solitaire and Xiphos

There is also Xubuntu installed. Xubuntu developers recommend having at least 20GB hard disk space free when installing Xubuntu. Although we can get away with a minimum of 8GB.

https://xubuntu.org/requirements/

When you update/upgrade Xubuntu do you use the software updater utility or use the command line? If we use the command line to update we also need to run a command to remove obsolete packages such as Linux kernels that have been replaced.

sudo apt autoremove

Regards

[Autodave]

$ df -hT
Filesystem     Type      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
udev           devtmpfs  895M     0  895M   0% /dev
tmpfs          tmpfs     185M  1.5M  184M   1% /run
/dev/mmcblk0p2 ext4       29G   13G   15G  47% /
tmpfs          tmpfs     924M     0  924M   0% /dev/shm
tmpfs          tmpfs     5.0M  4.0K  5.0M   1% /run/lock
tmpfs          tmpfs     924M     0  924M   0% /sys/fs/cgroup
/dev/mmcblk0p1 vfat      511M  5.3M  506M   2% /boot/efi
tmpfs          tmpfs     185M   12K  185M   1% /run/user/1000

[Autodave]

After running autoremove:

$ df -hT
Filesystem     Type      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
udev           devtmpfs  895M     0  895M   0% /dev
tmpfs          tmpfs     185M  1.5M  184M   1% /run
/dev/mmcblk0p2 ext4       29G   12G   15G  44% /
tmpfs          tmpfs     924M     0  924M   0% /dev/shm
tmpfs          tmpfs     5.0M  4.0K  5.0M   1% /run/lock
tmpfs          tmpfs     924M     0  924M   0% /sys/fs/cgroup
/dev/mmcblk0p1 vfat      511M  5.3M  506M   2% /boot/efi
tmpfs          tmpfs     185M   12K  185M   1% /run/user/1000

[Yellow Pasque]

Normally, and install like this would use up less than 3 GB of space.

For a full Xubuntu install? I don't think so. About 10GB is more of a reasonable expectation.

[Autodave]

OK...might have to readjust a bit. I just checked another laptop that I recently did a clean install on and I am using almost 8 GB of space. No swap. So, using my 1.3 GB swap from the laptop in question, I should be using 9.3 GB but instead I am using 13.3 GB. That 4 GB that is being consumed somewhere would be useful to have back: even 1/2 of it would be nice.

[TheFu]

If you want a small Linux install, use TinyCore. 64MB should do it. It runs from RAM, so nothing will be faster on any box with 256MB of RAM or more.

http://tinycorelinux.net/downloads.html - 21MB for a wired network and GUI computer. I remember when that was possible in about 4MB. We have definitely bloated our systems.

If you want more pre-installed junk and wifi, 163MB for TinyCorePlus. Good for online banking.

[Autodave]

TheFu: I have used Xubuntu almost from the start, but I may have to look into something else finally. I love this Stream because of its size and verified that I can run it for over 8 hours on battery!

Thanks to all of you!

[tea for one]

Also, if you want to start with a minimal Xubuntu

https://unit193.net/xubuntu/core/

I use this on my HP Stream 11.6" 32GB

A few apps added and quite snappy for a 2016 model.