How do you keep your OS clean?

[kingdomcome]

Sorry if the title is confusing, I wasn't sure how to word it.
Anyway, do you have a specific "junking old files I forgot I even had" routine? I've gotten way out of the habit of keeping my filesystems tidy & well organized... it's a mess

I was great at somehow managing to wipe out 5gb of random stuff I'd accumulated a few years ago, but these days I'm coddled by debian's apt package manager autoremove tool & frequently forget to check various folders for left-over old data I have no use for anymore.

Back when I used windows, this wasn't really a problem for me, because I couldn't perform windows updates without it bricking itself— so I'd just wipe & reinstall every 6 months before it could get to the point that I'm using up half my drive space on... insert a dozen question marks here. That's not really a solution, but hey it worked!

I'd love to know if anyone actually has a checklist they go through every X amount of months to keep things in order. (or if peace with computers is impossible)

[candycanearter07]

Not really. All my media folders are kinda a mess, but especially my Documents folder, hoo boy. Probably just try to keep your folders together and designate certain folders for certain things, tho.

[imnotjahan]

I just reinstall my operating system if things start to seem congested. All my important stuff is backed up, so I don't loose anything important. It's a lot easier though if you make a custom iso or autoinstall script for however you like your os configured, so you can just reinstall and go back to whatever it is you do.

[aketawi]

i find that keeping a Linux system nice and tidy is far easier than Windows, thanks to how easy it is to manage your installed packages, the way you manage and mount your filesystems, and the tools available to monitor them. the dust tool in particular helps out a bunch, as well as a couple scripts i've made or found.

all in all it just comes down to doing a little maintenance once in a while, and staying pretty critical of what you want to have installed on your system. especially since it's so easy to add and remove stuff at a whim, i'll often install some tool, run it once, and then delete it right after. (and then install and delete it again because i need to run it again)

[candycanearter07]

dust tool in particular helps out a bunch, as well as a couple scripts i've made or found.

dust looks cool, but my personal permenant go-to for as long as I can remember is ncdu. It's really intuitive in displaying the sizes, and it's pretty fast in scanning your system.
Also, if you happen to use yt-dlp to download a bunch of videos like I do, learn the config settings. I saved at least 10GB with just adding

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-f "bv*[height>480]+ba / best[height>480] / best" -S size:50M

to my yt-dlp config file.

[Corrupted Unicorn]

I tried to keep my photos, archives and files organized a while ago, but I've grown to accept the fact that hard drives (and sometimes, even your working computer) are bound to become dusty old attics where you forget about stuff, but eventually decide to look for something and end up finding something else you were looking for even longer time ago but then you gave up.

[Monado07]

I designate the 1st of every month as Computer Cleanup Day and sort / backup all my documents; which keeps things from getting too out of control. Every so often I´ll also open Control Panel and delete any programs I haven´t been using; though I could definitely trim back the amount of Steam games I have installed. The first time was super annoying and time consuming since I had files randomly strewn about like 8 different USB drives / SD cards / CD-Rs with tons of redundancies, so I had to manually sort through them folder-by-folder to ensure I backed up all my stuff and only 1 copy of said stuff. But now it only takes me about 4 hours, most of which is just waiting around for WinRAR to compress everything and uploading the backup to my Google Drive.

[nobo]

I'll usually just do something like

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du -h /mnt/hdd/ --max-depth=1

That will show me the disk usage in human readable format of every folder on the hard drive.
So I'll be able to quickly identify where the most space is being used.
And then I'll just enter the directory with the most stuff, narrowing it down.

Another thing I do that's pretty practical is I have a separation of long term storage and incoming files (like downloads).
Most things that you download from the Internet, you don't realistically want to keep forever.
So then I periodically go through those files moving things over into actual storage,
into the place where it goes if I want to keep it.


              
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[ABlueRose]

Every few months I'll suddenly think "Man, my computer's messy" and then I'll go through and organize and delete stuff. I download a lot of pictures, so opening up my files after a while normally is what sets me off. I play a lot of video games, and with a couple big games downloaded, I've been trying to keep on top of what games I have downloaded. I have a bad habit of not finishing games, so this is helping push me to do that!

[mothpanic]

thankfully I don’t download much stuff or create many files in the first place (thanks, chromebook storage capacity), so I don’t feel the need to clean it out that often. typically I only think about the stuff on my laptop when it’s running a little slow, and even then I rarely find any files above a couple kilobytes to clean out. it does feel nice to get rid of extra files, though, even when it’s only a couple.

[drmollytov]

My OS or my files?

Files I dump to an external hard drive in a folder named "backups [date]" every month or so. This keeps everything organized by date/year, which I've found is the easiest way for me to find things - I can reference by timeframe. It's also the easiest way to restore backups. Every five years or so I get an itch to Organize the Drives, during which I delete whatever I haven't needed in five years and organize the rest by topic ("receipts," "portfolio," "taxes," and so on).

OS: My best advice is "don't use Windows," I guess. Linux distros don't come with a lot of bloat, so there's not much to clean up. I have one laptop that has to run Windows, which I debloated the moment I brought it home. Windows still takes up an awful lot of drive space for what it (ostensibly) does, imo, but at least it's quieter visually.

Android: Universal Android Debloater works surprisingly well.

https://github.com/0x192/universal-android-debloater

[thiscat]

that's the fun part, i don't