Hey, everyone. I am new to Endeavour and new to the forums and I am happy to be here. I am not entirely sure that this post belongs here but I didn’t exactly know where to post it. I have a question that I have asked around on Reddit and other forums but never really got a definitive answer on. I have a 512GB SSD on my laptop. Any time I install an Arch based distro (I used to use Arco and now Endeavour) after a clean install I am left with around 450 GiB which equates to about 480GB. That’s about 30GB that is taken up after a clean install. When I tried out Fedora a little while back I am left with 505GB after a clean install. Now that’s not a humongous difference but that is still 25GB of free space that I lose anytime I install an Arch based distro. I was just wondering if anybody knew why this happens. Maybe it’s not crazy but to me it seems crazy that a distro would need around 30GB just for it’s inner workings. It just seems like space gets taken up a lot quicker on any Arch based distro that I try compared to others.
I figured this was kind of a newbie question so that’s why I ended up asking it here. I appreciate any information that anybody may have!
11G difference of what? Sorry I am not the best at storage, swap, partitions, etc. And is there anything I can change during the installation process? I don’t do anything out of the ordinary seeing it’s a pretty simple process to install.
So 8GB or the difference between Fedora and Arch is swap. Fedora doesn’t use traditional swap.
3GB is the package cache since you used an online installer.
The rest is unclear. You need to look at where the space is being used. Filelight is a tool to help you do that.
I can’t tell you where the space is going because I am not sitting in front of your machine and when I do an install it doesn’t take up that much space.
You can install without swap and you can delete your package cache after install. That will save you those 11G that @dalto is mentioning.
There are two things you should keep in mind if you are that desperate for 11G of storage:
Even though with 16G RAM you are unlikely to run out of memory during what most people would consider normal use of the computer, and therefore, swap isn’t strictly necessary, having at least a little bit of swap is a good idea, because it will allow certain optimisations in how RAM is used. Also, if you do something memory intensive, like video editing, and you run out of available memory, your computer will crash.
If you delete your package cache, downgrading packages will be quite tedious, as you’ll have to download the older version of each package manually from the package archive. Now, it is very rare that you’ll need to downgrade a package, so this risk may be acceptable to you. The reward you get for taking that risk (a few GiB of storage), in my opinion, isn’t worth it.
