Suitability for small disk sizes?

General
1

Hello all,

I see a number of threads regarding large update sizes and slow updates. Notably, the following:

I am playing with a cheap Chromebook that I have converted to be a Chrultrabook which has a 32GB eMMC. It installs just fine but the disk quickly fills up, presumably due to the update sizes.

Is there any way to manually trim this down or is it just not a good idea to try Bluefin on this system until the above issues are resolved?

Drew

2

rpm-ostree cleanup is a command that removes ostree deployment and gain back disk space

Also see

Note that efforts are ongoing to reduce update size:

1 Like
3

Yeah, I know there are efforts ongoing and I will monitor them. I am thinking at the moment, this Chromebook may not be a good choice.

I tried the rpm-ostree cleanup stuff but it doesn’t clean much. My /ostree directory takes 17G even with no rollback candidate. On a lark, I reinstalled from scratch and the /ostree/ directory is 15G and the disk has 13G free. The Fedora specs list a minimum of 15G free and 20G recommended so maybe that’s all it is.

Drew

4

A specialized image with a stripped down OS designed for this would be the way to go.

Though I think you wouldn’t want to start from FROM silverblue like we do, you’d probably want to compose from the bottom up to make it as small as possible.

5

It all and only depends on the hardware and Linux firmware available for your machine

32GB is considered to be near to the bare minimum to run a Linux desktop smoothly

I would recommend you to think about an upgrade to a 128GB system or more if possible
Those are quite cheap, and would be worth the upgrade

I have a Chrultrabook myself too

This is most probably also your whole OS; could you double-check that info on your system ?

17GB is considered as average for a Fedora desktop system

The added 2GB compared to a clean install is perhaps some current tree caching

As @j0rge mentioned, your best bet would be to make a custom stripped down image, from a base universal blue image

If you found that to be not enough but would want to remain cloud native and would be able to invest some time learning, NixOS / Guix is your next best bet

6

Thanks @Malix what model Chrultrabook are you using?

I do want to play with other systems so maybe I leave this one for NixOS and/or Guix.

Drew

7

Glad to help, @drewmoseley :heart:

I am (rarely) using an IdeaPad Chromebook which I was given and don’t exactly remember the model

There were already a Linux firmware installed from the previous user, so I did not really learnt how replacing a Chromebook firmware is being done

Please do consider that it is a significant (but potentially rewarding) time investment;
Even if I consider those distribution values to be part of the desktop OS future

Also see:

8

For what its worth I run Wayblue with swaywm on my old Samsung Chromebook with 16GB of storage and 2GB of RAM, and a Celeon processor. Not a lot of applications are installed and no pinned deployments. I still almost ran out of space after updating but uninstalled some stuff I didn’t use. At this time, lower storage devices do suffer unfortunately.