Bug completely borked my system (prompt help would be highly appreciated)

(possibly) unrelated context: i started using endeavour earlier this year (jan/feb). i have used manjaro beforehand for over a year but it wasnt a great experience for me. i use kde plasma with nvidia graphics on acer laptop with dual monitor setup (laptop + external monitor). i actually dont use the laptop monitor at all but the only combination of nvidia-inst parameters that worked for me was (if i recall correctly) --prime --conf --32 which results in following: asking for disk encryption key + grub + booting occurs on laptop monitor, SDDM occurs on external monitor - imo bc it is marked as default monitor, wayland session doesnt register the external monitor - the monitor turns off when using wayland - and x11 session doesnt register the laptop monitor - the monitor retains the boot text (bunch of lines that start with [ OK ] ) until turning off the computer. this isnt perfect but the external monitor works flawlessly and for comparison when i used manjaro nvidia drivers didnt work at all so i had to use nouveou which was pain. a couple of weeks back nvidia drivers broke for me in couple of games so i had to sudo downgrade lib32-nvidia-utils nvidia-utils nvidia-dkms nvidia-settings to latest commonly downgradeable 525 version - which for me was v525.89.02 - this in combination to using proton released before the driver updates (GE8-4) solved my issue. latest proton didnt work for some reason even after downgrading the drivers…

related context: a couple of days ago i noticed that dolphin showed my main drive (technically partition) was in red with around 7GB remaining which is strange bc last time i checked i barely used half (the entire drive is half TB). so i checked kde partition manager to the same result which was barely surprising since they are both kde apps. i then proceeded to install qdirstat and run it with sudo. i let it analyse my / directory and to no surprise it showed it was about 250 GB big. i was relieved and proceeded to think nothing of this bug - it would surely be fixed in the next update of whatever the package. since the space on the drive wasnt actually running out the system would surely use it if needed, right? WRONG earlier today i launched steam which started auto-downloading updates knowing the space is not running out. kde plasma apparently not knowing this crashed, tried restarting the compositor and who knows what else and eventually froze. i hard-power-offed my pc and tried booting it back. booting text was left on my laptop monitor as it always was even after reaching SDDM on the external monitor - but this time the external monitor only showed some text basically stating that SDDM is borked and to unlock the session from terminal which i should be able to reach after pressing ctrl+alt+F1. after pressing this combination my external monitor turned off and laptop monitor remained its booting text. after pressing ctrl+alt+F2 the external monitor turns back on and displays that text. i tried disconnecting the external monitor to no result. idk what to do.

update: after rebooting a few times i managed to get to SDDM. x11 hung up again almost immediatelly so next time i tried wayland which barely worked. next i checked dolphin according to which i have 28MB of space remaining. i started steam and uninstalled 80GB game which qdirstat confirmed is gone. currently at circa 160GB out of over 440 but dolphin showed no change

If you are using btrfs, make sure you delete your snapshots.

If not, make sure that your trash is empty.

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The package cache may be very large. That can be reduced with command paccache.

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Personally I dislike using SDDM, because it’s giving me ptsd due to it randomly not starting Plasma, when it feels like it. (I had this problem with various distros on various computers over the years) So I just use LightDM now. If the other suggestions don’t work out, switching the greeter is something you could also try, it’s easy to do from TTY. (if this works out for you, then don’t forget to edit the LightDM config file to make the keyring unlock on login)

maybe get a disk usage analyzer to see what is taking up so much space.

I can’t verify how well this program works but it should be compatible with KDE