Hi. I'm usually a Gentoo user. But I keep a number of other Linux distros installed and up to date, mainly for testing purposes.

Yesterday I ran the "update all" function on Neon using the Discover package manager. Imagine my surprise when I ran out of disk space on my root file system! I use two disk partitions (not counting Swap and Efi) for my Neon installation: / and /home. I learned that trick a long time ago; if something goes wrong and I have to reinstall Neon, at least I haven't lost any data.

Anyway, I did some poking around and identified /var/cache/apt/archives as the culprit. It contained ~20,000 .deb packages, and that took up over 13 GiB. It looks as if those have been accumulating since I first installed Neon almost two years ago. I can understand why a developer might want to roll his system back if something goes awry. But I had 15 - 20 .deb packages for every program installed under Neon. Why keep so many?

I solved my problem fairly easily by removing oodles of obsolete backups. But I'm left wondering if I have overlooked a system configuration option somewhere, maybe in the /etc directory? I suppose I can clean these things out manually, going forward, but there ought to be some way to automate it. The way I use Neon, I don't suppose I would ever need to revert more than one or two program updates. Any suggestions are welcome. Thanks!

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David Bryant
Canyon Lake, Texas
https://davidcbryant.net

A common housekeeping habit on Debian/*buntu types of distros is to occasionally run

Code: Select all

sudo apt clean

(or autoclean) to clear out apt's package cache. There are config options to disable caching, and probably to clear it out regularly/automatically.