Why is Trisquel 8 so much bigger than Trisquel 7?

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Potato
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Joined: 06/04/2014

Trisquel 7 used about 29% of my root partition. Trisquel 8 uses about 42%. (And this is after deleting the older versions of the kernel.)
Why? Is there anything that I can do to make 8 smaller? Thank you.

SuperTramp83

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Joined: 10/31/2014

>Why? Is there anything that I can do to make 8 smaller?

and by having 1 or 2 Gb more of space on your hard drive you are trying to achieve.. what exactly..? :P

Jodiendo
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Joined: 01/09/2013

Why is Trisquel 8 so much bigger than Trisquel 7?

Let me see this? Buy a bigger video hard-drive?
Let me see this one? Buy a bigger monitor
Let me see this one? Recount your numbers
Let me see this one? Ooh yes, yes the answer lay downs under the manufactures code.......
fine, fine the answer is the number, I pick zero and 10, maybe 5 4 your choice of madness.......

andyprough
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Isn't Mate a fairly beefy desktop? Have you thought about using Trisquel Mini with the LXDE desktop? I think that's the purpose of Mini, to reduce the size on disk.

Magic Banana

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Remove dependencies that are not needed anymore:
$ sudo apt autoremove

Remove DEB packages (however if it needs to be reinstalled it will have to be downloaded again):
$ sudo apt clean

Identify what eats up space (a specific program?, a log?, LaTeX documentation and font as on my system?, etc.). GNOME's disk usage analyzer can help you to do so, in a graphical way. The package is named "baobab". It is in Trisquel's repository.

Potato
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Joined: 06/04/2014

Thanks to everyone for your comments. I will consider them and try them.

jxself
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Joined: 09/13/2010

One word: Bloat.

Because no one cares about program size anymore. If you look at a chart of the size of distros over time the arrow is rocketing upward. It's nice that other people notice this too.

Potato
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Joined: 06/04/2014

I tried the two sudo commands autoremove and clean. They only brought it down to 39+%.
I installed and ran baobab (Disk Usage Analyzer). It aborted because it could not open a /tmp/...directory.

Ever since I updated to 8, every time I turn on the computer or reboot it does the following: first, a black screen; second, the Trisquel 8 default background; third, a black screen; fourth, the Trisquel 7 background screen that I was using with Trisquel 7, and this is where it asks me to type in my password to log on. After I log on, I get a fifth screen which is grey. And then finally, the Trisquel 8 desktop background that I chose to use appears, and it is Trisquel ready for me to use. This does not seem correct to me.

Magic Banana

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/tmp is emptied at every reboot. You must have had in there a directory with weird permissions (not allowing to traverse the directory). You can run Baobab with administrative privileges to not not have any such error:
$ gksu baobab

Do you have any broken packages? The "Synaptic Package Manager" can list them: click on "Custom Filters" (lower-left corner of the window) and then "Broken" (above).

Potato
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Joined: 06/04/2014

It did not list any broken packages (I did it 3 times over two days). When I executed the above command I got results, but I do not know what to look for: /=5.6gb. usr=4.6gb. lib=2.1gb. share=2.2GB. etc.

Magic Banana

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Baobab (GNOME's Disk Usage Analyzer) shows you a graphical representation of your disk usage. It initially shows you the whole partition occupation but you can click on any folder so that it shows what eats up space in that folder.

5.6 GB for the whole system is actually little. If you have no free space to make on your disks, consider buying another disk. Nowadays, the price per GB for large disk (at least 1 TB) is less than ten cents for HDD, less than a box for a small SSD (where you would only put the system, if you care about its speed).

Potato
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Joined: 06/04/2014

Thank you for your help, Magic Banana. My whole drive is 80gb. /dev/sda1 was set up as 15gb. My user sda6 is 63gb, and I have only used 1% of it so far. I suppose that I could reorganize the whole drive, and double or triple the sda1, if necessary. Thank again.

Magic Banana

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If you use 5.6 GB out of 15 GB, what is the problem?

If needed, you can use Trisquel's live system to resize partitions (but, again, I do not see the need if you use 5.6 GB out of 15 GB). Trisquel's live system includes GParted, with an easy-to-use GUI.

However, if your user data are on an XFS filesystem (the type Trisquel's installer chooses by default), then you cannot shrink that filesystem. You would have to backup your user data (not even 1 GB according to what you write: you can even copy them to the root partition), delete the partition, extend the partition with the system, recreate in the free space a partition for the user data, move them there and edit the line related to /home in /etc/fstab... or you can just reinstall (choose the manual partitioning in Trisquel's installer, called "Something else", I believe), after the backup of the user data and maybe of /etc (if you changed the system configuration) and of the list of installed packages: https://trisquel.info/en/wiki/cloning-system-or-how-make-copy-installed-packages-one-computer-another

Potato
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Joined: 06/04/2014

I thank you again Magic Banana.
The problem:
I was concerned about adequate space for the upcoming Trisquel 9. When I saw that Trisquel doubled in size from version 7 to version 8, I was concerned that if it doubled in size again (with version 9) it would take up at least 80 percent of sda1. I wondered if it would then be update-able.

Magic Banana

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The figures you gave (after 'sudo apt autoremove' and 'sudo apt clean' for Trisquel 8) show a 34% increase. If that growth rate remains constant, your Trisquel 9 system will weight 7.5 GB, your Trisquel 10 system will weight 10.1 GB, your Trisquel 11 will weight 13.6 GB and you will only face a problem with Trisquel 12. But Trisquel 12 will not be released before 2024. By then, I hope you will have a larger disk for the user data: 80 GB is not much. Assuming the disk is still working, you will still be able to use it for the swap (say 20 GB, considering an increase of the RAM and a will to hibernate) and the system (the rest: 60 GB): still assuming a 34% growth rate, you are good up to Trisquel 16, which will not be released before 2032.

Conclusion: relax and enjoy Trisquel 8! :-)

Potato
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Joined: 06/04/2014

Thanks, Magic Banana.