How to do an optimal cleaning of the system?

[Arnox]

The first thing ( imo ) is to figure out where your space is being taken up. This can range from old kernels, unmanaged timeshift snapshots, all the way to files that were copied incorrectly / in unknown locations.

If you install QDirStat (MXPI) and then run it on each drive, you will see where / what on each drive is taking up space. Then you can figure out what to do.

And, personally, I have found that stacer (also in mxpi ) is a great utility to clear both show and clear our caches, temp files etc . BUT ... use QDirStat first and see where your space is being eaten up, it may not be where you think!

Wouldn't MX Cleanup be pretty good as well? It won't take care of everything, but it shouldn't definitely take care of the basic stuff like unused kernels and the like.

[CharlesV]

Well.. while I will say yes, I have found that I can do a clean up with MX Cleanup .. and then immediately do a stacer clean up and it always finds more to clean up. (not a lot more, but always more. ) Could be on me, but I have tried to set everything in Mx Cleanup to clean everything.

[m_pav]

MX Cleanup works great on the categories listed within the app, but it doesn't go beyond them to the likes of Chromium based browsers, not too sure if it does anything with the likes of waterfox or browsers based on or forked Firefox.

[MXMUX]

I believe Charlie Brown hit the nail on the head. Find out what is packing the suitcase.

[keos]

Screenshot_2023-09-04_06-20-00.png

Screenshot_2023-09-04_06-28-46.png

EDIT:

In case someone requires more information, 'caissabase' is a Chess database, but to go deeper into the matter:

Here in MX-23, as I said before, I have 42% of the space occupied. I insist on saying that I think this is because I am always installing and uninstalling programs.

In MX-21, which is not the one I use frequently, I have just 25% of the space occupied, with the same programs as here, with wine and everything else, identical to MX-23.

[CharlesV]

It is very possible that your installing and uninstalling is using both cache as well as leaving some dependencies behind. Using stacer, I routinely clean up "another 400mb to over a gb of program or apt cache." .

Additionally, if you have installed additional kernels, or kernels have been updated, you will most likely have some of those around as well. ( plus the images the system builds for them too.)

[MXRobo]

I don't think that MX-Cleanup clears my Spotify .cache – which can get very large;
that - or I clean it using Disk Usage Analyzer so frequently that MX-Cleanup "misses" it.

[keos]

Well a little more clean but ...

Screenshot_2023-09-04_12-47-05.png

Code: Select all

keos@kaos:~
$ df -h
Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
udev            3.9G     0  3.9G   0% /dev
tmpfs           782M  2.9M  779M   1% /run
/dev/nvme0n1p4   44G   18G   25G  42% /
tmpfs           5.0M   12K  5.0M   1% /run/lock
tmpfs           1.6G   80M  1.5G   6% /dev/shm
/dev/nvme0n1p1  1.5G   19M  1.5G   2% /boot/efi
cgroup           12K     0   12K   0% /sys/fs/cgroup
tmpfs           782M  4.0K  782M   1% /run/user/107
tmpfs           782M   16K  782M   1% /run/user/1000
keos@kaos:~
$ 

No the kernels/images I always remove all of that ...

[m_pav]

You very well may have many leftovers from installing an dumping packages. I hate trying software on my daily driver, I usually use VM's to do that, but on the odd occasion where an app is highly dependent or direct hardware access or I need to evaluate it for performance, I sometimes have to mess with my daily driver.
I am VERY cautions about this and I take a screenshot of the app history as presented through right clicking the updater icon to ensure I can purge any element of its existence from my machine if I do not wish to keep it.

[keos]

One question...When you have to delete a file in the system, do you delete the content(s) first, or do you just remove the file in question? Thank you.