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
There is (was?) some big system log file that has no size limit by default. Don’t remember what exactly anymore.
deleted by creator
You can set SystemD’s journal to use a smaller size if that helps, as by default is can grow to be fairly large. https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Systemd/Journal#Journal_size_limit
Also may be worth manually cleaning old logs from the journal, seeing as your journal is already almost 400 MiB in size https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Systemd/Journal#Clean_journal_files_manually
If you have not already I also recommend adding a hook to pacman to automatically run paccache to clear out old packages from /var/cache/pacman/pkg/ an example of such a hook can be found here https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?pid=1694743#p1694743 I usually keep the last 2 packages around incase something is broken with a newer version and need to rollback.
pacman-contrib ships with a tool for cleaning old packages:
And then for automatic cleans:
Or manually:
deleted by creator