Two years or so tried fedora Silverblue and one the main issue i run into was storage. I had 180 GB SSD at the time and it filled to 90-something in a week. Now i have a 240 GB SSD and thing of try an immutable distro but worried about the storage space.
Anyone got insight into how big an SSD do i need?
Simplest put, a fedora immutable usually keeps two images, the one you’ll boot into next reboot, and the one you’re running. If a rpm-ostree update hasn’t been run it’ll be the one you’re running and the last one. My bazzite (heavier than silverblue I guess) images are ~ 14Gb, you need room for three (the two you’re using and room for downloading the next) plus 3% of your hard drive because fedora says so, so 3*14 = 42 + .03 * 240 = 42 + 7.2 = 49.2 =~ 50Gb.
Wait a sec, when I actually do a
sudo du -sh /sysroot/ostree/deploy/fedora/deploy/*I get 14Gb for my previous one and 2.1Gb for my current one, so there’s some diff black magic fuckery (ostree chunking) going on, which makes sense because it’s not taking that long to download. So 50Gb would be super safe, you might get away with 25 depending on how different the two images are (i.e. how much has been updated), but updating to the next major fedora version (e.g. 42->43) would be iffy.
Upshot is, it shouldn’t have filled to 90-something in the first place (maybe before ostree chunking, but even then), but if you end up with a lot of entries in your GRUB they’re all taking a notable chunk of space and you’ll need to purge some.
my flatpaks and appimages consume a hell of a lot more space than silverblue itself (which is essentially just a ‘browser launcher’ with an appstore ‘out-of-the-box’).
(and then there’s the data, which uses even more)
You’re not wrong, and perhaps a flatpak dependent distro isn’t the right choice for a disk constrained system if you need a lot of apps. My personal approach is whack a 1Tb+ SSD into root, but that’s me, not OP for whatever reason. I just did some scanning of my system for funsies and learned a bit, then shared.
I don’t know how silverblue works, but i’m assuming they offer some way to clean up. You wouldn’t want to clean up everything at all times everytime you update, since that kinda defeats the point of an immutable system, but 90gb sounds excessive and definitely warrants some sort of cleanup. On NixOS there is a garbage collect feature where you can remove old generations. If you never run that eventually the drive runs out of space as well.
I didn’t phrase that right. It filled to over 90% of the 180 GB SSD. Had move distos right away
If 90% of the 180 gig drive was filled up, that’s even more lol, definitely should be a way to clean that up but i’ve never used silverblue.
Edit: just realized you said that happened within a week. That’s really weird and i don’t think that’s supposed to happen. Over an extended amount of time without cleanup, sure, but not a week.
I’ve got NixOS running on a 32 GB netbook from 2016. It’s really bare bones and I only keep one or two generations to roll back to if needed.
I suppose to some extent that it depends on how aggressive you clean up after system updates.
It seems like on both Silverblue and NixOS there is stuff you can do to prune and cleanup unnecessary stuff.
The OS shouldn’t take that much storage regardless of whether its immutable. If you’re talking about containerized software, then it will depend on what programs you plan to run.
If you’re talking about containerized software
do you mean Flathub or something like docker/distrobox. I remember using toolbox for some CLI commands.
