Hello! So I have used linux mint for dual booting and its great! My main problem is that I have around 30 GB to spare for linux and I just run out of space pretty quickly. I wanted to ask, is there a distro that is more lightweight than linux mint that will work best with low amount of storage? I do prefer debian based distros but I am willing to try arch ones as well. Any recommendations will be very appreciated!
The distro is usually not really the problem, the desktop environment usually takes up a decent amount of disk space and snap/appimage/flatpak packages compared to native packages from your package manager. At least when strictly speaking about the system and programs, personal data (videos, Images, music,…) is still the biggest storage hog. I don’t think there is a good option, you could ofc shrink your windows partition and grow your Linux partition or just buy more storage, storage is really cheap these days. Additionally you can regularly clean up your system, delete the saved logs, delete unneeded files and uninstall unused packages/programs.
With just 30 gigs even Debian with xfce would probably take half that. I’d definitely agree with a second hard drive a 500 gig ssd is almost $50 these days
Yea I found some pretty cheap ssd’s in a store near me so I think it’s a better solution than installing a new distro. Thanks for your help!
Does cleaning the cache help? https://www.ubuntumint.com/clean-apt-cache/
The most lightweight in the amount of required packages is Alpine Linux. It has a command line installer, but much easier than Arch or Gentoo has.
Actually Alpine is great but it requires same amount of ram as any other distro on real hardware and on graphical desktop. The most lightweight desktop for Wayland is Sway, but you have to configure it by yourself. But it’s easy if you’re willing to to read docs.
I have cleaned the cache and it worked! I asked this question cause I also just want to try something new
Alpine linux looks neat but I just don’t thing I can manage installing it via the terminal. Is there something a little more user friendly you can recommend?
If you have a spare computer around or 10 gb diskspace left you can experiment Alpine Linux before installing it in the actual machine. The install process is actually really automated, basicly yes/no questions. Much faster than Ubuntu/Mint etc. “Beginner-friendly” installers. But yeah, after install setuping requires Alpine wiki.
Another what I can recommend is Arch Linux. With arch-install or archfi scripts it easy really easy to fine tune a lightweight on packages.
But out of all I recommend you to maintenance your hardware. Clean the dust with compressed air, replace thermal paste, upgrade ssd and max out ram. And the best part: get rid of Windows.
Edit. If you don’t have Nvidia gpu you could try LMDE5 and here’s why: https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?t=374128 But it won’t be a night and day difference.
My strongest advice is to decide between Alpine and Arch and go with Sway WM. It takes time to learn but afterall it’s all easy and Wayland is the future. I hate the current situation where Wayland is ready for the seamless beginner experience but Mint isn’t pushing for it.
I would recommend Peropesis to you as a minimalsitc distro but the dual booting process will not be as easy as mint you also can try to use a distro with xfce desktop environment but I would say that 30 GB aren’t much anymore and you should think about upgrading
Sparky is a very nice lightweight Debian-based distro.
“Arch-based” distros are problematic because of Arch’s rolling release model; if the distro maintainer has their own repo overlaid on Arch, they have to be very attentive to keeping them in sync, and most of them aren’t. So I wouldn’t recommend going that route.
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