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A screenshot of a file manager preview window for my ~/.cache folder, which takes up 164.3 GiB and has 246,049 files and 15,126 folders. The folder was first created about 1.75 years ago with my system
this post was submitted on 03 Dec 2023
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This is one of those things that makes me shake my head about Linux. It's these small dumb problems that make Linux inaccessible to the common person.
Yes because other operating systems never have any small annoying issues.
They do have small annoying issues. This is not one of them. This is something that would completely baffle a non-tech literate person. They'd just observe their computer becoming slow or not having space and say "well, Linux must have broken my computer."
FYI, Windows doesn't have any feature either to automatically clear all of it's temp folders (%TMP%, C:\Windows\Temp, C:\Windows\Panther), plus several other folders where orphaned files are often leftover, such as C:\Windows\Installer, C:\Windows\CSC, and various folders and cache files in your AppData\Local etc, to name a few off the top of my head.
I used to be a Windows sysadmin for a long time, and let me tell you, HDDs becoming completely full due to cache/temp files is very much a problem in Windows.
Guess what I found in
/home/{user}/.wine/drive_c/users/{user}/Temp, 10GB of log files. Although 9GB was from one time when I used Cheat Engine and I don't know what really happened tbh besides it causing a OOM crash.It created a 9GB sized file called
ADDRESSES.TMP, I never considered checking for temp files in .wine before. And I guess I should be checking all the prefixes created by Steam games as well...This has not been the case since at least w10, it has a tool to automatically clean several temp files and recycle bin.
If you're talking about the Storage Sense feature - it sucks. It only clears a handful of well-known locations, but it doesn't touch any of the orphaned content in C:\Windows\Installer, or the CSC or the old Panther folders from upgrades, not to mention several other files and folders in AppData. As I've said before, I've been a Windows sysadmin (until last year infact) managing over 20,000 devices, we've had Storage Sense on, but it's been mostly useless - to the point that I ended up writing own cleanup script and set it to run before we pushed out a new Windows feature update, because otherwise we'd get several devices which failed to update due to the disk being full.
I think it's that one. I certainly won't say it's a panacea, but I assume it would have solved the OP's case.
Have you checked your C:\windows\temp folder lately?
Oh yeah, you never hear such complaints about Windows or MacOS.
BTW can you recommend any good tools to cleanup my registry?
And don't forget to defrag, while you are at it.
Windows auto defrag now though. Dont hate me I love my Linux.
I once had a huge 20ish GB file in windows I could not get rid of, move, or delete. It was related to hibernation or something like that... Even though I had hibernation disabled and no amount of googling could get rid of the file.
This is something that would completely baffle a non-tech literate person. They'd just observe their computer becoming slow or not having space and say "well, my computer just broke itself better throw it in the trash and get a new one"
I've seen similar issues in appdata on windows when a program is poorly configured and simply grow its logs to ridiculous sizes. It's an issue with a program utilising that folder, not the os.
Not really. I've never seen .cache get bigger than 10GB, which is about how big the temporary files in Windows get if you never clean them.
It ended up being yay storing binaries from previous versions of AUR packages, definitely depends on the distro/usage but for arch-based it definitely clears up a lot of storage
Well, they're an Arch Linux user which is a special case. On Arch and derivatives it's the user's responsibility to manage the system so this doesn't happen, configure cleanup daemons, flush package managers, etc., alternatively it could also be a misbehaving application which would have to be reported. Arch is for hobbyists who likes to do this.
On other Linux distributions, Windows or macOS if this happens it's usually an application not properly managing its cache.
I've been running Linux as my primary OS since the late 90s and have never run into this problem.