I’ve got Arch Linux on my laptop, and for a while now I’ve been feeling
the burn from following Luke Smith’s tutorial for it, since he
recommended creating a separate root partition, which in my case is
30GB. This is probably fine for someone like Luke who takes great pains
to avoid using GUIs, but quickly filled up on my system. Every so often
I’ve removed some large program I haven’t needed in a few months, saving
1-2GB, but the space was quickly filled by something else. I then had
the idea of using pacman -Rsc to destructively pull out a lot of
unnecessary packages, along with a few necessary ones, and then repair
the damage. After re-installing X, Firefox, Emacs and my status bar
icons, my system seems to be functioning as well as it did before, but
with an additional 9GB of free space in the root partition.
This ties into one of the reasons people use minimal Linux distributions
like Arch in the first place, which is to deliberately install the
packages they do want, rather than removing the ones they don’t.
Removing the requirement that the system remains functional throughout
the cleaning process removes the stress of wondering if I need
libvoikko or whatever it is: If I need it, something will break, or
it’ll be reinstalled as a dependency for something else I do need.