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

Code

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

to my yt-dlp config file.