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
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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:
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