I have used Manjaro in the past then I distro hopped from it to many other distros including vanilla arch. I have noticed that every time I am on arch. It just keeps on consuming space.
I have a laptop with i5 4210U. I removed the CD drive and added a 120GB SSD about 2 Years ago. I always use the whole 120GB as my root/home until now.
Anyways, whenever I am on arch I notice that it takes around 12GB with xfce/i3wm installed and couple of drivers with all the basic packages like media player, samba, whatnot and maybe 3-4 packages from AUR. But within 2-3 days the space on my disk reduced and Arch was suddenly taking about 18GB. This happened when I was on Manjaro as well. Within a week of using Arch as my daily distro the space it was occupying was 45GB out of 120GB. What is with this? Does anyone has this issue? I checked all the files and cleared as much cache and old packages as possible and ended up with 41GB finally. I have another drive where I store all my files and downloads. I even used a disk analyzer to check and couldn’t find anything at all. I never had this issue on OpenSUSE Tumbleweed, Void or even Debian sid
This is strange. Have you tried with Filelight? I mean, if the space is occupied, there must be some huge files somewhere.
I didn’t try flielight because it is kde based and since I usually use xfce I didn’t want it to install extra tons of dependencies… I did try Baobab though. The most consumed space it showed me was from icons and GTK3 theme. I had installed Bibata, Papirus and Adwaita-Cyan-Dark. I have kept a copy of these files so that whenever I distro hop I can just copy and paste them in their respective directory. All the icons and theme size is around 170MB