Weird experience shrinking a partition using gparted

General system Newbie
1

I shrank a partition (ext4) using gparted.

(don’t take the sizes too seriously, ballpark)

Before:

  1. NTFS 200GB (Primary)
  2. BTRFS 700GB (Primary)
  3. EXT4 900GB (Primary)

After:

  1. NTFS 200GB (Primary)
  2. BTRFS 700GB (Primary)
  3. EXT4 500GB (Primary)
  4. EXT4 400GB (Primary)

I basically shrank partition #3 such that there is almost no free space left.

But when I open partition #3 in doublecmd it always shows free space is 0 no matter how many files I delete. But I kept on either moving or deleting files and eventually it did show some free space. I moved a couple of directories around 5GB and after the operation it showed 2.5 GB free space! Whew.

Yes, I did try fsck in the middle of all this and it said “all fine”.