After installing pacman packages (last one was ‘ungoogled-chromium’) my root partition of 20GB is completly full. Now I can’t update new packages.
My partition structure is: root (20GB) /home (470GB) swap (10GB)
How can I delete the garbage that is piling up in my root, and how to prevent it from happening again.
check to see howuch space your log files are using.
to prevent it from happening …
I would consider 20GB for / to be too small for long term desktop use.
and with just 470GB for /home, I would not split the two up.
log files only took up 800MB, but I fixed most of the problems now, by setting up pacman to put the cache in the home partition.
You are right, it was better to leave /home in the same partition, but now it is difficult to chance that. I thought it had advantages when something goes wrong with my root i can swap it out, but it only caused problems for me. Why do so many people split up there /home then? I thought it was common practice.
The main advantage of having a /home partition is that you can easily preserve it during reinstalls or during a distro hop. Reinstalls used to be more common in the past when some distros didn’t allow full distro upgrades without reinstalling. See this result which is still ranked #1 on duckduckgo
I personally use a @home btrfs subvolume which has most of the same advantages to me, and additionally allows @home and @root to share the same partition. It also allows me to use luks on everthing without bothering with lvm.
Yes, typically with two entirely separate disks, not just partitions on the same physical disk.