Two years or so tried fedora Silverblue and one the main issue i run into was storage. I had 180 GB SSD at the time and it filled to 90-something in a week. Now i have a 240 GB SSD and thing of try an immutable distro but worried about the storage space.
Anyone got insight into how big an SSD do i need?
I’ve got NixOS running on a 32 GB netbook from 2016. It’s really bare bones and I only keep one or two generations to roll back to if needed.
Simplest put, a fedora immutable usually keeps two images, the one you’ll boot into next reboot, and the one you’re running. If a rpm-ostree update hasn’t been run it’ll be the one you’re running and the last one. My bazzite (heavier than silverblue I guess) images are ~ 14Gb, you need room for three (the two you’re using and room for downloading the next) plus 3% of your hard drive because fedora says so, so 3*14 = 42 + .03 * 240 = 42 + 7.2 = 49.2 =~ 50Gb.
Wait a sec, when I actually do a
sudo du -sh /sysroot/ostree/deploy/fedora/deploy/*I get 14Gb for my previous one and 2.1Gb for my current one, so there’s some diff black magic fuckery (ostree chunking) going on, which makes sense because it’s not taking that long to download. So 50Gb would be super safe, you might get away with 25 depending on how different the two images are (i.e. how much has been updated), but updating to the next major fedora version (e.g. 42->43) would be iffy.
Upshot is, it shouldn’t have filled to 90-something in the first place (maybe before ostree chunking, but even then), but if you end up with a lot of entries in your GRUB they’re all taking a notable chunk of space and you’ll need to purge some.
I don’t know how silverblue works, but i’m assuming they offer some way to clean up. You wouldn’t want to clean up everything at all times everytime you update, since that kinda defeats the point of an immutable system, but 90gb sounds excessive and definitely warrants some sort of cleanup. On NixOS there is a garbage collect feature where you can remove old generations. If you never run that eventually the drive runs out of space as well.
I didn’t phrase that right. It filled to over 90% of the 180 GB SSD. Had move distos right away
If 90% of the 180 gig drive was filled up, that’s even more lol, definitely should be a way to clean that up but i’ve never used silverblue.
Edit: just realized you said that happened within a week. That’s really weird and i don’t think that’s supposed to happen. Over an extended amount of time without cleanup, sure, but not a week.
I suppose to some extent that it depends on how aggressive you clean up after system updates.
It seems like on both Silverblue and NixOS there is stuff you can do to prune and cleanup unnecessary stuff.
It depends on where that storage was used. Some details would be useful.
At its core, you shouldn’t need to keep any previous layers than the one you’re using for the OS.
You also technically don’t need snapshots for anything but your personal file space.
It depends on where that storage was used. Some details would be useful.
Linux mint 240 SSD is free 152 GB. The SSD includes home directory(28 GB) and Swap file(17 GB)
I have an 500 GB HDD that has 20 GB important files. I plan on keeping a copy on the 240 SSD and want the immutable allow twice that sizes(40 GB).
I don’t plan on playing any games but i do plan on trying out some video and photo editing, nothing too big.
Okay, but give a little look into where your disk is using space.
du -hsc /And work from there.
I keep getting “No such file or directory” and " Permission denied" on directories “/pro” and “/run”. I am assuming those are the partitions of the HDD, either way, i got 193 GB but its not down broken down into sections. i am also wondering if it counted the HDD storage space in the total storage used.
Linux mint does have Disk Usage Analyzer where i got the storage spaced breakdown from. the size of / directory is 117 GB, 48 of which is Timeshift snapshots, so 67 GB of used space out of 240 GB SSD.
The OS shouldn’t take that much storage regardless of whether its immutable. If you’re talking about containerized software, then it will depend on what programs you plan to run.
If you’re talking about containerized software
do you mean Flathub or something like docker/distrobox. I remember using toolbox for some CLI commands.
