The Downloads page lists these recommended requirements:
Processor speed: 2.4Ghz
Memory: 4GB of RAM
Hard Disk space: 60GB
I’m curious about the thinking behind the 60GB recommendation. My installation (20.04 out-of-box with Microsoft Edge added) is using about 12GB and most other Ubuntu-based distros recommend 25-30GB.
Very straighforward.
Most distros quote out of the box requirements. This isnt realistic. When folk use a desktop, lets say for 2 or more years, all sorts of apps are installed together with lots of data accumulated.
60GB is a fair figure in a realistic real world calculation.
Let’s say you won’t use that partition for storing much personal medias then you may need less than 60Gb.
But you’ll have to pay attention to your available space for root system by reducing logs size, regularly cleaning caches, and other residual elements.
Any app’ installed afterwards uses space. Some app’ format tend to use more space than others ( snap, flatpak… )
The 25~30GB recommendation means « it’s enough to boot » not necessarily enough for daily use.
Or not without careful thinking and cleaning.
I wish I had better understood this prior to my install. My 25gb root drive has all of 1.2gb free on it (and in fact, this is why I’m visiting the forum today). Short of re-partitioning, what “cleaning” can one easily do that would be effective but not risky? I think I may have made the mistake of installing flatpak + one or two of its apps to my root drive. Would it be safe to just uninstall them, and if so how would I go about doing this?
Yeah, uninstalling flatpak and snap packages you don’t use anymore is a good start.
You may use a tool like ncdu to « spot » the most occupied folders in your $HOME first, and see what you may safely remove.
sudo apt install ncdu
then from a terminal just launch
ncdu
it’s a semi-graphical app’ very convenient to use ( with keys, arrows, enter, ? for help, q for quit )
Then also « spot » in the root tree what are the most occupied folders ( generally /usr/lib where programs are stored ).
Commands like
sudo apt clean
sudo apt autoclean
sudo apt autoremove --purge
will help removing obsolete and unused packages or residual config’s at system level.
This command
dpkg -l | grep ^rc
will list residual config’s - generally related to kernels - that can be removed by
sudo dpkg -P $(dpkg -l | awk '/^rc/{print $2}')
Thumbnails for pictures are also continually stored - even if original files have been removed which is a stupid thing. You may remove thumbnails older than 7 days with that command :
find ~/.cache/thumbnails -type f -atime +7 -delete
To check occupation of partitions :
df -Thx squashfs -x tmpfs -x devtmpfs
To get a larger view on your disk and partitions ( from an almost full screen terminal because the answer is a large table ) :
lsblk -fe7 -o +size
and last but not least, to get the « nodal » occupation of a partition :
df -ix squashfs -x tmpfs -x devtmpfs
if you see values close to 100% here ↑, there is emergency for cleaning - even if the physical occupation ( previously returned by df -Th… ) was ok.
Thank you for that great response Coeur-Noir! I’ll try to give that a whirl. I’ve been sitting at less than 3gb free space for some time now and really need to do something before it suddenly gets worse due to an update, etc. Again, much thanks for the help!
Hello @Underdog .
I was thinking to reply with a couple more tips, but then I thought to write a blog post about it. Here you are, I hope it helps.
Thank you so much. You guys here at the UB forum are a tremendous help! I haven’t had time to look at any of this today as I’m mostly away from my computer doing yard work but I’ll hopefully get a chance tomorrow. I’ll probably have one or two more questions before it’s all said and done. 
Beware typo 
Unattended-Upgrade::Remove-Unused-Dependencises “true”;
I thought most recent ×buntu ( as of somewhere between 16.04 and 18.04 ) did the kernel cleaning automatically, didn’t they ?
What are the differences ( if any ) between :
⋅ “Software & Updates” → open up the “Updates” tab → “When there are security updates” → “Download and install automatically”
and
⋅ setting updates through « unattended upgrades » ?
@Coeur-Noir Thanks for catching the typo, it’s fixed.
Unattended Upgrades is a very powerful tool, in the small article I did not change too much as I wanted to keep it simple, but I enabled upgrades from all standard Ubuntu repositories. Well, short of proposed, which is not a good idea for everyone in my opinion.
Also enabled all the cleanup options which does more maintenance and cleanup than regular updates.
I am not sure how each DE and Flavour presents options or configures default, so as usual, going into the terminal and checking a couple of lines, is always going to give a consistent experience no matter if I am using Ubuntu Studio, Lubuntu, Ubuntu Budgie etc
Overall, the post was intended to let our community, and well any Ubuntu Flavour user, that they have a simple, yet really powerful tool at their disposal. Unattended Upgrades allows many options for different needs. For example you can install updates on shutdown, which is good for someone. You can blacklist packages from being upgraded, you can trigger auto reboots, do upgrades in chunks, auto fix package issues, log output with specific options.
With more effort you can even change schedulers to meet your specific needs and stay out of your way for the rest of the week.
I thought it was a good skill to learn as it applies both to desktop, server, virtual machine. Please let me know what you guys think. Would you like to see more posts like this? or shall we stay on the side of what can be done with the GUI?
Yes, absolutely !
I think any recent ×buntu has already some default config’ for unattended upgrade, that was the not so clear meaning of my question 