Before going through this, below is a screenshot of the drive and unused space.

My Pop!_OS install is on that last partition, and there is 75.99 GB of unused space. At the end of this, we'll see how much space has been cleared up.

Clear APT Cache

Among other things, the second command should remove old kernals automatically. Especially if you've had your install for a long time, these can build up and take space.

sudo apt clean

sudo apt autoremove --purge -y

Clean/Shrink System Logs

If you've never cleaned up the system logs before, they can actually take up quite a bit of space. To see how much space they're taking up, we can use the below command.

sudo du -h /var/log | sort -h | tail

To shrink logs to only contain the latest 100MB of logs, you can use the below command.

sudo journalctl --vacuum-size=100M

Clean Thumbnail Cache

This is where GNOME and Pop!_OS store thumbnail previews of files in the files manager. We can safely delete these.

rm -rf ~/.cache/thumbnails/*

Delete Old tmp Files

Now let's delete any temporary files that apps have left behind.

sudo rm -rf /tmp/*

sudo rm -rf ~/.cache/*

Clear Snap/Flatpak Cache

The below steps are obviously if you use Snap or Flatpak.

When running the below commands, you can read through what exactly is being deleted, but this is a safe operation. These are deleting unused runtimes and SDKs that are no longer needed.

flatpak uninstall --unused

flatpak remove --unused

du -sh ~/.var/app/* 2>/dev/null

Below is for clearing up Snap cache.

sudo snap list --all | awk '/disabled/{print $1, $3}' | \

while read snapname revision; do sudo snap remove "$snapname" --revision="$revision"; done

Finishing Up

Let's see how much space has been cleared from this.

Previously, there was 75.99 GB of unused space; now there is 93.34 GB of free space. That's almost 20 GB cleared up, and with just about 2 minutes of commands!

Part of: YouTube Channel Notes