What is the minimum root size for LMDE 5?

[Brian777]

Right now my root partition under LMDE 4 is 32 GB with 28 GB used. The installation guide recommends 100 GB for this partition, but I only have about 6 GB free on the disk. What is the minimum amount I can get away with allocating to the root partition? I want to delete as few files as possible from the disk.

I absolutely hate, loathe, and detest wiping the disk and reinstalling everything from scratch since it takes all day to get all my files back onto the disk and then I have a miserable time for several days afterward getting all of my settings back to their original states. I chose LMDE specifically to avoid having to do this. So I plan to install LMDE 5 on top of the existing LMDE 4. If I can't do that, I might just stick with LMDE 4 and forget about upgrading; the alternative is too painful.

I would appreciate any help.

[axisofevil]

Have you put all your filesystems (including /home) in one partition?

[all41]

Have a read here:
https://easylinuxtipsproject.blogspot.c ... -mint.html

[Brian777]

My root partition is 32G. My /home partition is most of the rest of the 2TB drive.

[RIH]

My root partition is 32G. My /home partition is most of the rest of the 2TB drive.

but I only have about 6 GB free on the disk.

You need some additional space, or need to lose some data, fairly quickly.

If you have space issues then, in my opinion, having a separate root & home partition is a luxury that you cannot afford.
If you do then you run the risk of either running out of root space or having empty disk space that you cannot use because it is reserved for root.
In my opinion, in these circumstances it is far better to just have one partition & so waste zero space.

I think that the advantages of having a separate /Home (such as they are) are far outweighed by the disadvantage of losing valuable disk space..

[Brian777]

I could remove data to make room if I had to, but I don't understand why the space requirement is jumping from 32 GB to 100 GB. The operating system can't have grown *that* much. I want to know what the actual minimum space required is.

[RIH]

You can't...
Because it all depends on what Applications you add (& how) & only you know that.

100GB sounds rather 'over the top' to me, but, as you have found, 30GB can easily be filled up.

[smurphos]

I could remove data to make room if I had to, but I don't understand why the space requirement is jumping from 32 GB to 100 GB. The operating system can't have grown *that* much. I want to know what the actual minimum space required is.

28GB is a huge amount of space to be using in a root partition in my book. You allowing timeshift to save snapshots to it perchance?

A fresh install of LMDE5 takes around 8GB of root space, you obviously want some breathing space, but avoiding flatpak apps I'd be quite happy running any Mint flavour on a 16GB root partition, 20GB plus should be sufficient for most use cases, 32GB for all. This assumes that if you are a time-shift user you set it's snapshot location to a different partition.

100GB mentioned in the installation guide is the suggestion for root and home together, plus space for timeshift.

[cpedretti]

28GB is a huge amount of space to be using in a root partition in my book. You allowing timeshift to save snapshots to it perchance?

A fresh install of LMDE5 takes around 8GB of root space, you obviously want some breathing space, but avoiding flatpak apps I'd be quite happy running any Mint flavour on a 16GB root partition, 20GB plus should be sufficient for most use cases, 32GB for all. This assumes that if you are a time-shift user you set it's snapshot location to a different partition.

100GB mentioned in the installation guide is the suggestion for root and home together, plus space for timeshift.

for the installation of LMDE5, I kept the 40Gb root partition that I had created for the installation of LM20.2 Edge, which alone took 21Gb.

[Brian777]

Ok. Thanks. This makes a lot more sense now.

According to the disk usage analyzer, I have:

/ 24.6 GB
/usr 12.7 GB
/var 5.1 GB (mostly in /var/lib/flatpak/repo/objects)
/opt 4.3 GB
/lib 1.9 GB
boot 423.4 MB

I don't know what flatpaks I have, so I'm not ready to erase them yet. I have looked at Software Manager, but I don't see how to tell which packages are flatpaks, or how to get a listing in alphabetical order so I can find things easily.

But I could probably move a few more GB to the root partition.

[Termy]

[...]

The next time you install your system, keep '/home' separate; it'll make your life a bazillion times easier! That way, when you install again, you can choose 'other' (or something like that) when asked about the drive stuff, to keep your existing '/home'. It might put a spanner in the works if you use encryption, though. You can find guides for all this ad nauseam.

[Brian777]

The commands flatpak list and flatpak history display nothing, so I don't know what could be using up space in the flatpak directory.

[Termy]

That seems like a lot for '/usr'. Mine is 3.5G, but I have a very minimalistic setup. You can try the following command from '/usr':

Code: Select all

du -h --max-depth=1 | sed -r '$d; s/^([.0-9]+[KMGTPEZY]\t)\.\//\1/' | sort -hr

Then run it again in various directories within there, or somewhere else. The above one-liner shows only directories, BTW. By doing that, you should be able to get a very good idea where all the space is going. I actually have a columnized version of this as a function in my '~/.bashrc' to make life so much easier:

Code: Select all

overview() {
	du -h --max-depth=1 | sed -r '
		$d; s/^([.0-9]+[KMGTPEZY]\t)\.\//\1/
	' | sort -hr | column
}

So, I just run overview in a directory to get an overview of where the space is going therein.