Trimming Down

File bloat can happen to anyone. These simple tips will help you keep your systems lean and responsive.

- By Ali Imran Nagori

Linux is stable, fast, and versatile. But let’s be honest: After a while, things get messy with temporary files, old packages, piled-up old kernels, and unused applications. Worse than the unused applications are the applications you install just to try and then remove without knowing what they'll leave behind.

Recently, I started noticing that my sleek Ubuntu system was feeling heavy, which made me realize it was time to liberate some disk space. As a longtime Linux user, I’ve faced these issues many times. The good news is that cleaning up your Linux system isn’t hard. In this article, I'll show you some ways to declutter your system and reclaim disk space while keeping Linux running smoothly.

Remove Unnecessary Packages

Over time, as you install and remove software, your system can pile up unused packages, specifically, orphaned packages. Orphaned packages are software components that were originally installed as dependencies for other programs, but you no longer need them because the parent software has been removed.

So, it’s good to get rid of them and reclaim the space. For Ubuntu and other Debian derivatives:

$ sudo apt autoremove

Sometimes cleaning starts with just updating the system:

$ sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade

30 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove, and 1 not upgraded.

This command fetches the latest patches and also clears out some older files in the process. So, you’re basically sweeping the floor before you start reorganizing.

Additionally, the following command:

apt autoclean

clears out all the package files that were downloaded in the local repository. It wipes out everything in /var/cache/apt/archives/ and /var/cache/apt/archives/partial/. The only exceptions it leaves behind are the lock file and the partial folder.

Look for Big Files