Hi. I am on Tumbleweed. For some reason my space is filling up. It used to be 62.9 Gb left now its 60.9 gb left.
Could it be the kernel log files spouting errors? What is the root cause of this? I have uninstalled and deleted a lot of stuff to no avail.
Check your journal.
Check the size of /var/log
total 78664
drwxr-xr-x 1 root root 1986 Jan 29 20:05 .
drwxr-xr-x 1 root root 120 Dec 12 10:25 ..
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 23440 Jan 28 10:42 alternatives.log
drwxr-xr-x 1 root root 0 Jan 25 20:59 apparmor
drwxr-x--- 1 root audit 106 Dec 4 20:00 audit
-rw------- 1 root root 1103929 Jan 29 20:05 boot.log
-rw------- 1 root root 3416 Nov 26 08:23 boot.log-20231126.xz
-rw------- 1 root root 4420 Dec 1 04:12 boot.log-20231201.xz
-rw------- 1 root root 4724 Dec 5 09:23 boot.log-20231205.xz
-rw------- 1 root root 3716 Dec 7 09:19 boot.log-20231207.xz
-rw------- 1 root root 3596 Dec 8 08:27 boot.log-20231208.xz
-rw------- 1 root root 6932 Dec 19 14:55 boot.log-20231219.xz
-rw------- 1 root root 3120 Jan 13 17:14 boot.log-20240113.xz
-rw-rw---- 1 root utmp 6144 Nov 25 20:56 btmp
drwxr-x--- 1 chrony chrony 0 Oct 5 20:24 chrony
drwxr-xr-x 1 root lp 84 Sep 22 22:05 cups
-rw-r----- 1 root root 0 Oct 9 2022 firewalld
drwxrwxr-x 1 root lp 6 Jan 4 19:50 hp
drwxr-sr-x 1 root systemd-journal 64 Oct 9 2022 journal
drwx------ 1 root root 0 Dec 22 00:52 krb5
drwx------ 1 root root 8 Jan 27 01:23 libvirt
drwx------ 1 mysql mysql 0 Dec 17 23:16 mysql
-rw------- 1 root root 355414 Jan 29 08:47 pbl.log
-rw-r----- 1 root root 3205243 Jan 28 15:02 pk_backend_zypp
-rw-r----- 1 root root 10738272 Jan 27 13:24 pk_backend_zypp-1
-rw------- 1 root root 85502 Jan 29 20:05 plymouth-debug.log
-rw------- 1 root root 29340 Jan 29 20:03 plymouth-shutdown-debug.log
drwx------ 1 root root 0 Oct 9 2022 private
drwxr-x--- 1 root root 0 Jan 13 02:30 samba
-rw-r----- 1 root root 6428205 Jan 29 20:15 snapper.log
-rw-r----- 1 root root 373392 Jul 28 2023 snapper.log-20230729.xz
drwx------ 1 root root 0 Jan 16 00:00 speech-dispatcher
drwx--x--x 1 root root 14 Jan 27 01:23 swtpm
drwxr-x--- 1 root root 0 Dec 5 18:09 tuned
drwxr-xr-x 1 root root 498 Jan 27 08:41 updateTestcase-2024-01-27-08-41-14
drwxr-xr-x 1 root root 498 Jan 28 10:40 updateTestcase-2024-01-28-10-40-53
-rw-r----- 1 root root 6122781 Jan 29 20:18 wpa_supplicant.log
-rw-r----- 1 root root 287680 Dec 17 2022 wpa_supplicant.log-20221218.xz
-rw-r----- 1 root root 315568 Mar 7 2023 wpa_supplicant.log-20230308.xz
-rw-r----- 1 root root 322972 Jun 4 2023 wpa_supplicant.log-20230605.xz
-rw-r----- 1 root root 339168 Jul 29 2023 wpa_supplicant.log-20230729.xz
-rw-r----- 1 root root 380452 Sep 7 21:26 wpa_supplicant.log-20230908.xz
-rw-r----- 1 root root 433980 Oct 21 21:52 wpa_supplicant.log-20231022.xz
-rw-rw-r-- 1 root utmp 244992 Jan 29 20:05 wtmp
-rw-rw-r-- 1 root utmp 8672 Oct 29 2022 wtmp-20221029.xz
-rw-rw-r-- 1 root utmp 8880 Dec 3 2022 wtmp-20221203.xz
-rw-rw-r-- 1 root utmp 9288 Jan 10 2023 wtmp-20230110.xz
-rw-rw-r-- 1 root utmp 10280 Feb 19 2023 wtmp-20230219.xz
-rw-rw-r-- 1 root utmp 10236 Mar 23 2023 wtmp-20230323.xz
-rw-rw-r-- 1 root utmp 9192 May 2 2023 wtmp-20230502.xz
-rw-rw-r-- 1 root utmp 11712 Jun 28 2023 wtmp-20230628.xz
-rw-rw-r-- 1 root utmp 10664 Aug 27 08:47 wtmp-20230827.xz
-rw-rw-r-- 1 root utmp 10252 Oct 22 06:56 wtmp-20231022.xz
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 45011 Jan 29 20:06 Xorg.0.log
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 45599 Jan 29 20:03 Xorg.0.log.old
drwx------ 1 root root 1060 Jan 26 13:59 YaST2
drwxr-x--- 1 root root 52 Jan 27 03:32 zypp
-rw-r----- 1 root root 45546502 Jan 29 16:28 zypper.log
-rw-r----- 1 root root 1158016 Oct 21 21:51 zypper.log-20231022.xz
-rw-r----- 1 root root 551000 Nov 3 13:52 zypper.log-20231105.xz
-rw-r----- 1 root root 389664 Nov 15 10:23 zypper.log-20231115.xz
-rw-r----- 1 root root 373880 Nov 19 18:08 zypper.log-20231122.xz
-rw-r----- 1 root root 377500 Nov 30 11:35 zypper.log-20231201.xz
-rw-r----- 1 root root 424652 Dec 6 17:15 zypper.log-20231207.xz
-rw-r----- 1 root root 640632 Dec 18 19:05 zypper.log-20231219.xz
You should copy n paste from the CLI and paste it into a Reply using the Preformatted Text feature </> on the Taskbar. Also, include the command you executed and following prompt. It’s much more readable that way.
Have you checked ~/.cache, ~/.local and /tmp ?
For example, du -h --max-depth=1 /tmp ~/.cache ~/.local
But do not delete anything if you do not know precisely what you are doing and what the data are needed for.
@Basilcat using btrfs? Using snapper (snapshots)?
Run these commands as root user;
btrfs filesystem usage /
journalctl --disk-usage
coredumpctl list
snapper list
Do you even understand the output from the TO? This file is only 10MB big. This is completely normal for a standard system…so no problem at all.
-rw-r----- 1 root root 10587297 21. Jan 20:19 pk_backend_zypp-1
That means you recommended the TO to delete round about 50MB because “That should restore some space back and is a good start”.
Do’oh 
And recommending the TO to directly delete stuff is a bad advice. It would be better to analyze the problem first before jumping to conclusions which wont help the TO.
Malcolm pointed out some helpful commands for first analysis. And i pointed to the documentation for the journal which explains what the max size of it can be and how to properly set it up via journald.conf.
Blindly deleting stuff without knowing what the files are doing and how it is done properly is in most cases a beginner mistake.
Free space being filled can be caused by a lot of different factor, depending of which program is installed and how you use your system … the first thing to do is to investigate to find the cause of your problem …
In addition to @malcolmlewis commands you can use a tool like filelight Filelight - KDE Applications ( which is probably already installed if you use kde ) to see which directory on your system is the most filled up, it can help.
Also if by any chance that can help, one year ago I’ve discovered that flatpak was gradually eating more and more disk space on my system, after the run of the command flatpak repair ~20GB were free and had no issues after that…
ncdu is a lightweight text UI program designed for easy navigation for the purpose of determining how much space is consumed by each directory. If snapshotting is enabled, it can be highly consumptive. If keeping downloaded rpms in the cache after download and installation is enabled, it can gobble a lot of space. So can the systemd journal if its size isn’t limited via /etc/systemd/journald.conf. Everything in ~/.cache/ is disposable, and may need occasional purging, depending on the behavior of your apps, and whether any do a lot of crashing. Anything in /var/log/ more than a year old is basically useless.
Whether 60G or 62G amounts to a little or a lot or something else is unknowable without context. How much is the total filesystem space? How much of it is used?
