Q Bloated Debian
This Debian 11 is my first attempt to explore Debian and I truly loved it for its stability and user-friendliness. I’m dual-booting Debian with Windows 10. I was wrong to set the Debian partition of 40GB only (2.6GB/41.8GB available). A short while later it seems the hard disk is full and many programs won’t install. I’ve removed many unnecessary applications, yet I still can’t install new ones.
What must I do to regain new space or to enlarge the partition?
Joe Wyatt
A In our view, 40GB is more than enough for even the most generous of installations, even with multiple desktop environments, so you must be losing space elsewhere. If you have set up a separate partition for /home, your home directory is the first place to look, especially if you’ve been downloading large files such as videos. If /home is not part of /, it’s possible that something is generating a lot of error messages and filling up /var/log with them, although it would have to be a lot to use that much space.
We’d normally suggest installing a disk-space viewer, such as the terminal- based ncdu or one of the graphical desktop equivalents, but you can’t install anything until you’ve at least partially resolved this problem. Fortunately, you can get a good idea of disk space usage with the standard tools you already have. $ df -h will show the usage of each filesystem, both in gigabytes and percentage. If your root partition isn’t showing 100 per cent usage here, it’s possible you’ve run out of inodes, which you can check with:
$ df -i
